Lucy Pollard-Gott's Blog

I’m happy to be participating in the Scotland Reading Challenge 2013, created by Faith Hope and Cherrytea.  For my proposed reading list, I have pulled together some books already on my to-be-read stack (even if part of that stack is only on my Kindle!) and added some books that I’ve discovered via the Reading Challenge bookshelf on Goodreads.

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott — next on my list for this quintessential author of Scottish historical novels.
Monarch of the Glen by Compton Mackenzie — I’m catching up here. This was a recent selection of the Reading Challenge group, and it looks good–I don’t want to miss it!
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane — Macfarlane devotes one section, and therefore one of his walking journeys, to a long walk in Scotland. I’m there in spirit if not on foot.
The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson– Kidnapped and Catriona are also on the menu, this year or next.  Two of Stevenson’s most influential characters, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde and Long John Silver, are on The Fictional 100, ranking 67 and 93, respectively.  Last year, I read James Pope-Hennessey’s excellent biography of Stevenson, along with a re-read of Treasure Island, for this post on Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion.
The First Blast of the Trumpet (Knox Trilogy #1)  by Marie Macpherson — I just learned about this well-researched historical novel from the discussion boards, which featured a video about it. I am keenly interested in religious history and theology, so this story of the Scottish Reformation appeals greatly.
The Highland Clans by Alistair Moffat — My history book club accumulated points may go toward this one!

I’m sure I will be lured by other Scottish-themed titles as the year progresses and I learn from others’ choices. Now is the point where I must wish myself luck! However much I am able to read, I appreciate the spur to goal-setting and the camaraderie of more book-obsessed friends!

This season offered moviegoers adaptations of two sprawling, classic novels, Les Misérables and Anna Karenina. They represent two rather different solutions to the inevitable problems of selection and compression when one is dealing with such huge stories. Both novels unfold over some time in their fictional worlds and, likewise, take the attentive reader days, months, or even years to absorb fully. But movies have only two or three hours to lay out the essentials and take the reader from emotional point A to point B, or to points X, Y, and Z.

In Les Misérables, the selection and compression of incident was given in advance by the adaptation for the stage, Boublil, Schönberg, and Kretzmer’s hugely successful musical. The undulating succession of emotional lows and peaks which Victor Hugo wrote are all here with a song to embody each. But is this a help to the film or too big a constraint on the pace of storytelling in a medium so different from the stage?  The stage is a place where scenes can be rotated into view or merely suggested with a backdrop or a few props, where action is limited by space, and where audience and actors agree that a character may stop, lift us up (with the strength of a Jean Valjean!), and symbolically carry us through the emotional journey of a song.  In a film, especially one that is avowedly “realistic” in its aim, the agreement is a bit different. The story is told scene by scene at more or less the pace of life; gaps in time--sometimes huge ones--serve the purpose of compression. The screenwriter’s and film director’s arts involve first selecting the scenes that will piece together the narrative and then setting them up (requiring again a whole universe of choices) for the camera to capture. 

In Tom Hooper’s film of Les Misérables, the succession of songs seems to force a certain staccato pace on the events, as if they must be reeled out quickly before the song is over. Because this cuts against the grain of realism in what the eye sees, the film seems oddly rushed and busy, and star Hugh Jackman, as Jean Valjean, mirrors this pace in his valiant, breathy singing.  Fantine’s fall from seamstress to prostitute, after selling her locket, hair, and teeth, apparently occurs all in the same day, in the space of a few desperate hours, while the song that brackets it takes mere minutes.  The cuts and scene changes that permit the illusion of the passage of time, in a fine version such as the 1998 nonmusical film (starring Liam Neeson and Uma Thurman), are not available here.

Perhaps the frenetic pace of Fantine’s degradation conveys its tragedy, but as a viewer I was ironically grateful when the motion ceased while she sang “I dreamed a dream”--this song, both in the musical and in the film, bestowed the gift of time, room to contemplate all her character had undergone and would yet suffer.

Does this mean that a sung-through musical is not possible on film? Not at all. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), directed by Jacques Demy, is successful precisely because it never feels rushed or constrained by the songs; its dreamy quality matches song to action in a way that is awe-inspiring, justifying the admiration this film has received. For Les Mis, Hooper faced the doubly difficult task of adapting an adaptation, and he likely felt an obligation to include all the songs from the musical out of respect for its fans;  but this ready-made “screenplay,” in song form, short-circuited the possibility of making a musical better adapted to screen storytelling.

In Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, the artistic tables are turned. Other films to this point have used conventional realism and judicious scene selection to solve the problem of compressing Tolstoy’s massive masterpiece. Wright, however, used the freedoms and conventions of the stage to make a brilliantly unconventional adaptation.

Placing his actors on and off a theater stage allowed abrupt scene changes and mere suggestions of incidents that were not out of place but rather served the emotional impact of the story. When Vronsky’s horse suddenly and fatally tumbled off the stage, the viewer was jarred into real shock comparable to Anna’s, and “realism” of a very different sort was managed creatively (such a fall might indeed break a horse’s back or crush its rider). Yet it is not real--it’s a film, and we knew that “no animals were harmed in the making.” It’s an illusion achieved with cuts, special effects, and clever choices, part of the overarching illusion that the whole story can be recounted before the viewers’ eyes. Wright straddled film and theater, moving between them in a way that was surprising and constantly fresh, and a sophisticated commentary on both.

But Les Mis made a different set of choices: film realism and live singing. It has many strengths within those confines, not least of which is a complete realization of the stage musical. It fleshes out the action in epic proportions, to the point of floating a full-size galley (so it seems) for prisoner Jean Valjean to sweat and pull and sing into harbor. On this grand epic canvas, several other performances stood out and deserve mention. Anne Hathaway (Fantine) and Russell Crowe (Javert) found each of their character’s genuine center, and both sang very effectively. Anne will likely bring home many well-merited awards, probably an Oscar. Amanda Seyfried sang the aerial notes of Cosette with natural beauty and sincerity, and I would have wished more screen time for her.  Eddie Redmayne (Marius), hitherto best known for playing Jack in The Pillars of the Earth, was a bracing surprise, for his screen charisma and excellent singing. But the biggest and most welcome surprise was the cameo of Colm Wilkinson as M. Myriel, the saintly bishop whose gifts of candlesticks and forgiveness purchased Jean Valjean’s soul for God, launching the miracle of his new life and pilgrimage of faith. Wilkinson reminds us of the possible heights an actor can reach in portraying the soul of a great man. Hugh Jackman embraces this challenge wholeheartedly and seems to understand the moral choices that beset Jean Valjean as well as the prayerfulness with which he approached those choices. As it did for Wilkinson in the stage musical, Jackman’s best moment arrived in the pivotal song, “Bring Him Home.” And so Jackman fulfilled the role, especially its greater physical demands in the film. Was he a “revelation” in the role? Perhaps not. But like Jean Valjean, he proved himself utterly faithful to it.

Jean Valjean ranks 34th on The Fictional 100 .

Related post:

Breakage and Mending in “Anna Karenina” (2012): A Review of the film by Joe Wright

 

 

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Each new film adaptation of a classic must make choices about the images and symbols that will accompany its characters and help to reveal the significance of what happens to them. This is especially true when adapting a very long, profound, and polyphonic novel such as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. 

Such choices by a director and by actors will forever color the impressions of a viewer encountering the story for the first time, even if she or he should go on to read the novel or watch other films of it.   For viewers who already know it, from its original or other renderings, a new adaptation is still an exciting opportunity to experience the work in a completely new way. In its boldness, Joe Wright’s 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina does not disappoint, with its abundant creativity and fresh emphasis, attributable undoubtedly as well to Tom Stoppard’s screenplay.

I’d like to highlight one motif that struck me as I watched (and listened–sounds are very important in this film too).  That motif is the alternation of breakage and (when possible) mending, mostly concerning the delicate relationships between people but extending to other things as well.  The viewer learns right away that the film will dance between scenes explicitly framed on stage as moving tableaux and “real” scenes, often introduced by spillage of the action over the proscenium or stretching out across an infinite rear stage. This gives the whole film an impressive trompe l’oeil quality, where one can’t always be sure what one is seeing. (The last scene of the film is a particular triumph of Wright’s  technique.) This method yields the first “breakages”–breaking the habitual rules governing the boundaries between stage and life, and breaking with our expectations of how period novels should be told on film.  In effect, the director announces immediately, “This will not be a well-behaved costume drama, so watch carefully!”  And indeed we do, because besides being sumptuous, it is paced quickly with sudden switches and interruptions.  Interestingly, chronological sequence is obeyed, giving the viewer at least one reliable anchor.  Perhaps, since Tolstoy inserted so much foreshadowing into his plot, there is little need to rearrange events to hint at the final outcome.

The early scenes visit the daily life and family strife of Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, played delightfully by Matthew Macfadyen, who was Keira Knightley’s Darcy in Joe Wright’s 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice. As Stiva, Macfadyen turns in an expansive, scene-stealing performance! His arrival at his office is a tuneful, surreal dance that made me wonder if this would be a musical throughout?  But in the first of many abrupt ruptures, the background melody of the characters’ lives is broken by the jangling of tragedy, the death of the train attendant, witnessed by Anna and blighting her initial passing encounter of Vronsky at the station.

Anna comes to visit her brother’s family in Moscow on a mission to mend the marriage whose breakage is threatened by Stiva’s unfaithfulness to his wife Dolly. Anna’s appeal to her sister-in-law to forgive her straying (though loving) husband works, and the breach is mended, despite Stiva’s inability to change his ways significantly.  Anna’s visit, however, gravely disrupts the life of Kitty, Dolly’s 18-year-old sister, who has hopes of marrying Count Vronsky, a young army officer. Seeing Anna so utterly captivate Vronsky at the ball where she imagined he would propose to her sends Kitty into despair and illness.  Before she learns the truth about Vronsky, Kitty turns down a proposal from the progressive farmer and landowner Levin, but that is not the final word for them. Wright’s film handles this counterpoint tale of Kitty and Levin’s redeeming love with extraordinary charm and sincerity. I won’t spoil it with more details, but it unfolds through fine, restrained performances by Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Gleeson in particular captures Levin’s mysterious mixture of inner quiet and turmoil.

The rough outlines of Anna Karenina’s tragedy are well known, part of worldwide culture, but for any who are coming to her story for the first time, there are spoilers ahead…

As Anna, Keira Knightley must demonstrate layer upon layer of fragility as the character suffers a series of ruptures in all the major relationships of her life. Knightley does have such acting resources, which she showed in The Duchess (2008; a story with many parallels and some important divergences from the present one) and in the somber fable Never Let Me Go (2010).  But because the actress herself is so young, it is hard for her to show some of the nuances of Anna’s vulnerability and pain as she is compared to the young princess Vronsky’s mother intends for him. It is not only that she may be supplanted, but that she feels time slipping past her.  Despite her undeniable part in creating the fatal string of events, the word “inexorable” seems the only one to describe the cascading breakages–with her husband, lover, son, and her friends in Petersburg “society”–that leave Anna unconnected, like a beautiful marionette with all its strings cut. Although Vronsky and Anna were both judged by society for their behavior, their positions were never equivalent. Vronsky risked some things, notably in his career, but Anna risked everything. He could escape the situation by marrying, but she had no escape, she thought, but the one she chose.  In the end, she allowed herself to break like a fallen bisque doll.

I called “breakage” a motif in the film rather than simply a theme because Wright uses it repeatedly in both sights and sounds. I’ve never heard so many loud, sudden noises in a film that didn’t involve explosions or car crashes! Everyone seems poised to be startled (including the audience). The rapid scene changes and dislocations between stage and “real world” reinforce sudden revelations in the plot or strong emotions.  For example, when Anna flatly tells her husband that he is not mistaken, that she indeed loves Vronsky and is his mistress, the carriage they are riding in registers Karenin’s shock with a screech.  Often, Anna’s voice seems to catch in her throat and she draws in breath audibly.  Her gasp becomes a scream when Vronsky’s horse suddenly falls, in one of the most brilliant bits of stage business–and filmmaking–I’ve ever seen. (We know this is coming, but the surprise and horror are triggered as if we didn’t.)  Vronsky is thrown clear but the horse’s back is broken, and the unbearable shot rings out. Vronsky has lost one of beings he loves most, and the foreshadowing of irreparable brokenness is complete.

Wright’s film made me see Tolstoy’s great domestic novel as an especially poignant study in entropy, the tendency of the universe to increase in disorder: How easy it is for a horse and rider to fall, for a bone to break, or for a marriage to fail.  Mending, when it is even possible, requires tremendous energy and calls forth humility and steadfast qualities, especially love, loyalty, and forgiveness.  Without them, the din of heartbreak can be deafening.

 

Anna Karenina ranks 53rd on The Fictional 100 .

Each new film adaptation of a classic must make choices about the images and symbols that will accompany its characters and help to reveal the significance of what happens to them. This is especially true when adapting a very long, profound, and polyphonic novel such as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. 

Such choices by a director and by actors will forever color the impressions of a viewer encountering the story for the first time, even if she or he should go on to read the novel or watch other films of it.   For viewers who already know it, from its original or other renderings, a new adaptation is still an exciting opportunity to experience the work in a completely new way. In its boldness, Joe Wright’s 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina does not disappoint, with its abundant creativity and fresh emphasis, attributable undoubtedly as well to Tom Stoppard’s screenplay.

I’d like to highlight one motif that struck me as I watched (and listened--sounds are very important in this film too).  That motif is the alternation of breakage and (when possible) mending, mostly concerning the delicate relationships between people but extending to other things as well.  The viewer learns right away that the film will dance between scenes explicitly framed on stage as moving tableaux and “real” scenes, often introduced by spillage of the action over the proscenium or stretching out across an infinite rear stage. This gives the whole film an impressive trompe l’oeil quality, where one can’t always be sure what one is seeing. (The last scene of the film is a particular triumph of Wright’s  technique.) This method yields the first “breakages”--breaking the habitual rules governing the boundaries between stage and life, and breaking with our expectations of how period novels should be told on film.  In effect, the director announces immediately, “This will not be a well-behaved costume drama, so watch carefully!”  And indeed we do, because besides being sumptuous, it is paced quickly with sudden switches and interruptions.  Interestingly, chronological sequence is obeyed, giving the viewer at least one reliable anchor.  Perhaps, since Tolstoy inserted so much foreshadowing into his plot, there is little need to rearrange events to hint at the final outcome.

The early scenes visit the daily life and family strife of Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, played delightfully by Matthew Macfadyen, who was Keira Knightley’s Darcy in Joe Wright’s 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice. As Stiva, Macfadyen turns in an expansive, scene-stealing performance! His arrival at his office is a tuneful, surreal dance that made me wonder if this would be a musical throughout?  But in the first of many abrupt ruptures, the background melody of the characters’ lives is broken by the jangling of tragedy, the death of the train attendant, witnessed by Anna and blighting her initial passing encounter of Vronsky at the station.

Anna comes to visit her brother’s family in Moscow on a mission to mend the marriage whose breakage is threatened by Stiva’s unfaithfulness to his wife Dolly. Anna’s appeal to her sister-in-law to forgive her straying (though loving) husband works, and the breach is mended, despite Stiva’s inability to change his ways significantly.  Anna’s visit, however, gravely disrupts the life of Kitty, Dolly’s 18-year-old sister, who has hopes of marrying Count Vronsky, a young army officer. Seeing Anna so utterly captivate Vronsky at the ball where she imagined he would propose to her sends Kitty into despair and illness.  Before she learns the truth about Vronsky, Kitty turns down a proposal from the progressive farmer and landowner Levin, but that is not the final word for them. Wright’s film handles this counterpoint tale of Kitty and Levin’s redeeming love with extraordinary charm and sincerity. I won’t spoil it with more details, but it unfolds through fine, restrained performances by Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Gleeson in particular captures Levin’s mysterious mixture of inner quiet and turmoil.

The rough outlines of Anna Karenina’s tragedy are well known, part of worldwide culture, but for any who are coming to her story for the first time, there are spoilers ahead…

As Anna, Keira Knightley must demonstrate layer upon layer of fragility as the character suffers a series of ruptures in all the major relationships of her life. Knightley does have such acting resources, which she showed in The Duchess (2008; a story with many parallels and some important divergences from the present one) and in the somber fable Never Let Me Go (2010).  But because the actress herself is so young, it is hard for her to show some of the nuances of Anna’s vulnerability and pain as she is compared to the young princess Vronsky’s mother intends for him. It is not only that she may be supplanted, but that she feels time slipping past her.  Despite her undeniable part in creating the fatal string of events, the word “inexorable” seems the only one to describe the cascading breakages--with her husband, lover, son, and her friends in Petersburg “society”--that leave Anna unconnected, like a beautiful marionette with all its strings cut. Although Vronsky and Anna were both judged by society for their behavior, their positions were never equivalent. Vronsky risked some things, notably in his career, but Anna risked everything. He could escape the situation by marrying, but she had no escape, she thought, but the one she chose.  In the end, she allowed herself to break like a fallen bisque doll.

I called “breakage” a motif in the film rather than simply a theme because Wright uses it repeatedly in both sights and sounds. I’ve never heard so many loud, sudden noises in a film that didn’t involve explosions or car crashes! Everyone seems poised to be startled (including the audience). The rapid scene changes and dislocations between stage and “real world” reinforce sudden revelations in the plot or strong emotions.  For example, when Anna flatly tells her husband that he is not mistaken, that she indeed loves Vronsky and is his mistress, the carriage they are riding in registers Karenin’s shock with a screech.  Often, Anna’s voice seems to catch in her throat and she draws in breath audibly.  Her gasp becomes a scream when Vronsky’s horse suddenly falls, in one of the most brilliant bits of stage business--and filmmaking--I’ve ever seen. (We know this is coming, but the surprise and horror are triggered as if we didn’t.)  Vronsky is thrown clear but the horse’s back is broken, and the unbearable shot rings out. Vronsky has lost one of beings he loves most, and the foreshadowing of irreparable brokenness is complete.

Wright’s film made me see Tolstoy’s great domestic novel as an especially poignant study in entropy, the tendency of the universe to increase in disorder: How easy it is for a horse and rider to fall, for a bone to break, or for a marriage to fail.  Mending, when it is even possible, requires tremendous energy and calls forth humility and steadfast qualities, especially love, loyalty, and forgiveness.  Without them, the din of heartbreak can be deafening.

 

Anna Karenina ranks 53rd on The Fictional 100 .

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Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion, Crown Publishers, 2012.

The last few years have seen a number of new books about Long John Silver, the charming and treacherous one-legged pirate created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his adventure masterpiece Treasure Island (1881-1883).  John Drake’s Flint and Silver (2008), which announced itself as a prequel to Treasure Island, recounts how English sailor John Silver had to choose either a life of piracy or death after his Portuguese vessel Ria de Ponteverde was defeated in a battle with the pirate ship Victory under Captain Nathan England.  He chose to live–and thus began his first service on a pirate vessel. Meanwhile, the story of Joseph Flint takes shape elsewhere until that destined time when Flint and Silver shall meet and clash over the treasure. The events that set the stage for Treasure Island are spun out in this opener and two subsequent books by Drake, Pieces of Eight (2009) and Skull and Bones (2010). Also in 2008, Edward Chupak gave us his version of Silver in a book whose subtitle is as colorful as its subject, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with A Goodly Amount of Murder. He envisions Silver’s early life as threaded with crimes, petty and otherwise, from the beginning, and lets Long John Silver narrate his life’s story in his own words.

Jim, Long John Silver, and his Parrot, N. C. Wyeth, 1911

Instead of taking Stevenson’s characters backwards to explain their origins, Andrew Motion’s novel, Silver: Return to Treasure Island sends them forward.  As a full-fledged sequel, it assumes the story line of Treasure Island and then makes a plausible leap to carry it into the next generation.  Whereas Drake’s style and pacing reminded me of a writer like Bernard Cornwell, opening with battle and rarely stopping the action for long, and Chupak’s first-person narration swaggers like a pirate, Motion’s style and tone come much closer to Stevenson’s, in cadence, verbal grace, and reserve. Motion’s narrator is more directly comparable to Stevenson’s, as we shall see.

Skipping to the next generation provides a solid framework for any sequel, because the main characters who have survived the originating story can, if the sequel-writer wishes them to, make dramatic, but brief appearances to validate, ground, and still advance the new story. These venerable characters get to show how they are ending their days and how they are parenting the next generation.  They may also have unfinished business to take care of before it is too late, which is unquestionably the case here.  When we meet Long John Silver, we are not surprised that he is still obsessed with the treasure. But that meeting does not take place right away.

In Motion’s sequel, as in the original, the story opens at an inn and with Jim Hawkins, but this time the inn is not the Admiral Benbow but the  Hispaniola, and the young man working there—or rather, evading his father’s orders–is Jim Hawkins, Jr., son of the Jim Hawkins, who is now middle-aged and moody, grieving for his wife who died after the birth of her only son; this haunted man brightens only when recounting his youthful adventures to all who frequent his public house  by the Thames. Because his father relives his past so often in the telling, we can be certain young Jim knows the details of the Treasure Island adventure, however reluctantly he carries its legacy.   Young Jim is the restless son of a once very restless father, and Jim, Jr. is considering his options for striking out by himself—escaping his life so far–when the appearance in the fog of a small rivercraft, the Spyglass, and its mysterious female pilot pull him swiftly into the spell of adventure and, more important, into the grasp of Long John Silver. The girl in the boat is none other than Natty Silver, the old pirate’s daughter, who has come to fetch him to meet her father (and also her intriguing mother).   In her boat Natty carries a cage holding a mynah bird named Spot—only the first indication that she is indeed her father’s daughter.

As Natty cautiously begins to reveal the facts of her life, Jim is attracted by nearly everything about her. He feels a natural kinship, since their childhoods were both dominated, if not quite blighted, by “the shadow of our fathers’ adventures.” Contemplating Natty’s beauty and compelling self-possession, and setting her beside his mental picture of Silver, young Jim wonders, “Was my companion an innocent, sprung from ancient corruption? Or was she an expert in the art of dissembling, as her father had also been?” (p. 29). Just as his own father was ambivalent about Long John, so Jim is both drawn to Natty and suspicious of her. At the very least, Natty has her father’s art of persuasion, because soon young Jim finds himself seated in her boat, headed toward her home in Wapping, and on his way to meet the legendary man who had shaped not only Natty’s life so far but also the lives of both boys named ‘Jim Hawkins.’

As in Stevenson’s classic, this story is narrated in the first person by Jim, and the fifth chapter, “I Meet a Ghost,” provides a dramatic climax to this first part; it is full of memorable, lyrical writing. When Jim first sees Silver, it is powerfully discordant with the image he has long held of the smooth villain, nimble even on his wooden leg. Natty’s father is old, emaciated, and blind, ill almost to the point of death but fiercely holding on to reach this moment. When finally apprised of Jim’s presence, it is clear he has been waiting to meet “Mr. Hawkins” with an eagerness that fascinates Jim with its intensity: “I thought that if I were to lay my hand on Mr. Silver, he would quicken into his former self, and my own fingers would become my father’s, clutching at him for help, or to repel him” (p. 48). Aware himself of the shimmering contradiction he represented, Silver says:

“It is me! Long John Silver as was. But neither of these any more. Not for many a day. It is Mr. Silver now—the same man but different. Like music set in a different key, you might say.” (p.52) 

 Motion brings a very natural poetic cadence to Silver’s speech, and this special rhythm serves to show how careful the old pirate can still be when choosing the words that will achieve his purposes.

Silver has longed for this moment of reunion across generations, but more than that, he has been waiting for this opportunity—the chance to recover something he’s been missing these long years, the treasure map still in the possession of Jim Hawkins, Sr., in a chest kept locked at the foot of his bed, with the only key held close by a cord around his neck.  Will young Jim betray his father to the extent of stealing this map, or “borrowing” it, as Silver entreats him to do? Silver knows the weaknesses of a young man’s heart–his urge for independence and adventure  and his discomfort in the yoke of his father’s commands; he especially intuits how to persuade this young man, with the path made smoother by the budding friendship between Natty and Jim (aloof interest on her side, romantic longing already on his). Andrew Motion has prepared the way admirably and subtly with his picture of the strain between father and son, showing the faults and wounds that made the older Jim a difficult father.

Why “borrow” the map? To recover the barred silver still cached on Treasure Island, even many years after enough gold had been recovered on that earlier voyage to make prudent men rich and secure for life–not that the older generation had been exactly prudent with their wealth.  This unfinished business from the first novel becomes the engine for the sequel, and it surely would stall right here if Jim did not agree to obtain the treasure map by stealth—so I am not revealing much in this.  But I leave it to the reader to embark on the adventure of the “Return to Treasure Island”—to accompany the voyage out on the Silver Nightingale, and to learn what horrors (not too strong a word) the crew and passengers discover on the lonely island.  I will only say that before they reach Treasure Island the novel has a trancelike quality, as if it were occurring in the dream-time.  (Perhaps this poetic rhythm is not surprising, coming from this author who is a former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and current President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.)  After they reach the island, however, the trance is broken: the brutality disclosed to them exceeds even their imaginings of the dangers such an isolated society might present, if left to itself.  In the end, this will lead Jim to reflect on “the persistence of evil, and the thousand ways in which we are likely to be disappointed when we look for a better world” (p. 382). Motion does have a habit of telling the reader what to think about whatever is happening, often by having Jim repeatedly interpret himself, drawing conclusions about his own motives, disavowing some and affirming others.   Sometimes this comes off as natural, while at other times it feels like an authorial intrusion; in most cases, however, these observations are trenchant and therefore largely welcome on their own terms. 

In his excellent New York Times piece, “To Be Continued: The art of the sequel,” Motion considered the varieties of sequels and their distinctive place in the shape-shifting web of ideas fostered by online communication, with its diverse channels for self-expression. Interestingly, he locates their function primarily as agents of continuity rather than change. To be sure, a good sequel will do more than imitate its original or simply finish an unsettled thread of a story; it will develop and teach something new about the original characters, plot, or themes, placing them in a different or expanded context. But Motion fastens on sequels as modes of preservation–even conservation–safeguarding what we have already inherited as familiar and true about a narrative and the fictional people who live within its bounds. In this view, a sequel (or prequel) that too drastically alters the foundational plot or tampers too much with its characters may strike readers as a misrepresentation.  The “art” of the sequel must surely, then, consist in finding clever ways of respecting these boundaries while sometimes inventively skirting them. For example, CBS’s new series “Elementary” keeps enough of the canonical features of Sherlock Holmes and Dr.  Watson (even when Watson is named “Joan” and played by Lucy Liu), including their dynamic partnership  and Holmes’s singular methods of detection, to pass muster as a related, though highly unconventional, sequel (or so it seems to me). The BBC’s “Sherlock” maintains continuity with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s plots, but performs rather astounding transformations on them, retaining enough to convince.  By contrast, as a moviegoer, I didn’t feel that Beastly (2011) kept enough of the threads of the original to tie it to the “Beauty and the Beast” fairytale.

Motion follows his own rules in his sequel to Treasure Island. The sacred original is respected and readers can comfortably assume it as a limiting framework within which the new story will consistently unfold. The elder Jim Hawkins seems to have changed the most, and yet there is license for him to differ, since he was still a boy when the action of Stevenson’s novel closed. Motion makes a convincing case that Jim had trouble “coming home” after his youthful exploits were over, and some of his efforts at “normal” landlubbing life turned to sorrow. His obsession with telling tales from his youth provides familiarity and ensures continuity into this younger generation. And Silver is still Silver. When Jim sees Natty and the captain of the Nightingale so faithfully carrying out John Silver’s bidding, he muses that “the old man’s force of personality was evidently still extraordinary, although his body had almost ceased to be” (p. 115). As Silver’s body atrophied and weakened (symbolically extending his loss of a leg), his personal force was still radiantly alive and powerful. Thus, while crafting the changes to a character in a sequel (or in a prequel, anticipating changes that will solidify in the foundation narrative), the sequel author must choose among those characteristics which are deemed to be defining and central to the character’s personhood in the fictional universe. Motion has done a splendid job of this, and the new characters he has launched—Jim Hawkins, Jr. and Natty Silver—are attractive and complex enough to support their own sequels to this inaugural voyage.

Long John Silver ranks 93rd on The Fictional 100 .

Related posts:

“Elementary” premiere on CBS—a very new Holmes and Watson keep the faith
Coming of Age as a Detective: Sherlock Holmes in “The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I”
Looking for the Beast in “Beastly”: A review of the film

Related links:

Andrew Motion, “ To Be Continued: The Art of the Sequel ,” The New York Times Book Review, August 17, 2012.
James Pope Hennessey, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography , Simon & Schuster, 1974. [an illuminating biography of the creator of Long John Silver]
Treasure Island (2012) [DVD] , starring Eddie Izzard, Donald Sutherland, Elijah Wood, and Toby Regbo. [This adaptation takes some liberties with Stevenson's story but Eddie Izzard's outstanding realization of Long John Silver redeems all]

Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion, Crown Publishers, 2012.

The last few years have seen a number of new books about Long John Silver, the charming and treacherous one-legged pirate created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his adventure masterpiece Treasure Island (1881-1883).  John Drake’s Flint and Silver (2008), which announced itself as a prequel to Treasure Island, recounts how English sailor John Silver had to choose either a life of piracy or death after his Portuguese vessel Ria de Ponteverde was defeated in a battle with the pirate ship Victory under Captain Nathan England.  He chose to live--and thus began his first service on a pirate vessel. Meanwhile, the story of Joseph Flint takes shape elsewhere until that destined time when Flint and Silver shall meet and clash over the treasure. The events that set the stage for Treasure Island are spun out in this opener and two subsequent books by Drake, Pieces of Eight (2009) and Skull and Bones (2010). Also in 2008, Edward Chupak gave us his version of Silver in a book whose subtitle is as colorful as its subject, Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with A Goodly Amount of Murder. He envisions Silver’s early life as threaded with crimes, petty and otherwise, from the beginning, and lets Long John Silver narrate his life’s story in his own words.

Jim, Long John Silver, and his Parrot, N. C. Wyeth, 1911

Instead of taking Stevenson’s characters backwards to explain their origins, Andrew Motion’s novel, Silver: Return to Treasure Island sends them forward.  As a full-fledged sequel, it assumes the story line of Treasure Island and then makes a plausible leap to carry it into the next generation.  Whereas Drake’s style and pacing reminded me of a writer like Bernard Cornwell, opening with battle and rarely stopping the action for long, and Chupak’s first-person narration swaggers like a pirate, Motion’s style and tone come much closer to Stevenson’s, in cadence, verbal grace, and reserve. Motion’s narrator is more directly comparable to Stevenson’s, as we shall see.

Skipping to the next generation provides a solid framework for any sequel, because the main characters who have survived the originating story can, if the sequel-writer wishes them to, make dramatic, but brief appearances to validate, ground, and still advance the new story. These venerable characters get to show how they are ending their days and how they are parenting the next generation.  They may also have unfinished business to take care of before it is too late, which is unquestionably the case here.  When we meet Long John Silver, we are not surprised that he is still obsessed with the treasure. But that meeting does not take place right away.

In Motion’s sequel, as in the original, the story opens at an inn and with Jim Hawkins, but this time the inn is not the Admiral Benbow but the  Hispaniola, and the young man working there—or rather, evading his father’s orders--is Jim Hawkins, Jr., son of the Jim Hawkins, who is now middle-aged and moody, grieving for his wife who died after the birth of her only son; this haunted man brightens only when recounting his youthful adventures to all who frequent his public house  by the Thames. Because his father relives his past so often in the telling, we can be certain young Jim knows the details of the Treasure Island adventure, however reluctantly he carries its legacy.   Young Jim is the restless son of a once very restless father, and Jim, Jr. is considering his options for striking out by himself—escaping his life so far--when the appearance in the fog of a small rivercraft, the Spyglass, and its mysterious female pilot pull him swiftly into the spell of adventure and, more important, into the grasp of Long John Silver. The girl in the boat is none other than Natty Silver, the old pirate’s daughter, who has come to fetch him to meet her father (and also her intriguing mother).   In her boat Natty carries a cage holding a mynah bird named Spot—only the first indication that she is indeed her father’s daughter.

As Natty cautiously begins to reveal the facts of her life, Jim is attracted by nearly everything about her. He feels a natural kinship, since their childhoods were both dominated, if not quite blighted, by “the shadow of our fathers’ adventures.” Contemplating Natty’s beauty and compelling self-possession, and setting her beside his mental picture of Silver, young Jim wonders, “Was my companion an innocent, sprung from ancient corruption? Or was she an expert in the art of dissembling, as her father had also been?” (p. 29). Just as his own father was ambivalent about Long John, so Jim is both drawn to Natty and suspicious of her. At the very least, Natty has her father’s art of persuasion, because soon young Jim finds himself seated in her boat, headed toward her home in Wapping, and on his way to meet the legendary man who had shaped not only Natty’s life so far but also the lives of both boys named 'Jim Hawkins.'

As in Stevenson’s classic, this story is narrated in the first person by Jim, and the fifth chapter, “I Meet a Ghost,” provides a dramatic climax to this first part; it is full of memorable, lyrical writing. When Jim first sees Silver, it is powerfully discordant with the image he has long held of the smooth villain, nimble even on his wooden leg. Natty’s father is old, emaciated, and blind, ill almost to the point of death but fiercely holding on to reach this moment. When finally apprised of Jim’s presence, it is clear he has been waiting to meet “Mr. Hawkins” with an eagerness that fascinates Jim with its intensity: “I thought that if I were to lay my hand on Mr. Silver, he would quicken into his former self, and my own fingers would become my father’s, clutching at him for help, or to repel him” (p. 48). Aware himself of the shimmering contradiction he represented, Silver says:

“It is me! Long John Silver as was. But neither of these any more. Not for many a day. It is Mr. Silver now—the same man but different. Like music set in a different key, you might say.” (p.52) 

 Motion brings a very natural poetic cadence to Silver’s speech, and this special rhythm serves to show how careful the old pirate can still be when choosing the words that will achieve his purposes.

Silver has longed for this moment of reunion across generations, but more than that, he has been waiting for this opportunity—the chance to recover something he’s been missing these long years, the treasure map still in the possession of Jim Hawkins, Sr., in a chest kept locked at the foot of his bed, with the only key held close by a cord around his neck.  Will young Jim betray his father to the extent of stealing this map, or “borrowing” it, as Silver entreats him to do? Silver knows the weaknesses of a young man’s heart--his urge for independence and adventure  and his discomfort in the yoke of his father’s commands; he especially intuits how to persuade this young man, with the path made smoother by the budding friendship between Natty and Jim (aloof interest on her side, romantic longing already on his). Andrew Motion has prepared the way admirably and subtly with his picture of the strain between father and son, showing the faults and wounds that made the older Jim a difficult father.

Why “borrow” the map? To recover the barred silver still cached on Treasure Island, even many years after enough gold had been recovered on that earlier voyage to make prudent men rich and secure for life--not that the older generation had been exactly prudent with their wealth.  This unfinished business from the first novel becomes the engine for the sequel, and it surely would stall right here if Jim did not agree to obtain the treasure map by stealth—so I am not revealing much in this.  But I leave it to the reader to embark on the adventure of the “Return to Treasure Island”—to accompany the voyage out on the Silver Nightingale, and to learn what horrors (not too strong a word) the crew and passengers discover on the lonely island.  I will only say that before they reach Treasure Island the novel has a trancelike quality, as if it were occurring in the dream-time.  (Perhaps this poetic rhythm is not surprising, coming from this author who is a former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and current President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.)  After they reach the island, however, the trance is broken: the brutality disclosed to them exceeds even their imaginings of the dangers such an isolated society might present, if left to itself.  In the end, this will lead Jim to reflect on “the persistence of evil, and the thousand ways in which we are likely to be disappointed when we look for a better world” (p. 382). Motion does have a habit of telling the reader what to think about whatever is happening, often by having Jim repeatedly interpret himself, drawing conclusions about his own motives, disavowing some and affirming others.   Sometimes this comes off as natural, while at other times it feels like an authorial intrusion; in most cases, however, these observations are trenchant and therefore largely welcome on their own terms. 

In his excellent New York Times piece, “To Be Continued: The art of the sequel,” Motion considered the varieties of sequels and their distinctive place in the shape-shifting web of ideas fostered by online communication, with its diverse channels for self-expression. Interestingly, he locates their function primarily as agents of continuity rather than change. To be sure, a good sequel will do more than imitate its original or simply finish an unsettled thread of a story; it will develop and teach something new about the original characters, plot, or themes, placing them in a different or expanded context. But Motion fastens on sequels as modes of preservation--even conservation--safeguarding what we have already inherited as familiar and true about a narrative and the fictional people who live within its bounds. In this view, a sequel (or prequel) that too drastically alters the foundational plot or tampers too much with its characters may strike readers as a misrepresentation.  The “art” of the sequel must surely, then, consist in finding clever ways of respecting these boundaries while sometimes inventively skirting them. For example, CBS’s new series “Elementary” keeps enough of the canonical features of Sherlock Holmes and Dr.  Watson (even when Watson is named “Joan” and played by Lucy Liu), including their dynamic partnership  and Holmes’s singular methods of detection, to pass muster as a related, though highly unconventional, sequel (or so it seems to me). The BBC’s “Sherlock” maintains continuity with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s plots, but performs rather astounding transformations on them, retaining enough to convince.  By contrast, as a moviegoer, I didn’t feel that Beastly (2011) kept enough of the threads of the original to tie it to the “Beauty and the Beast” fairytale.

Motion follows his own rules in his sequel to Treasure Island. The sacred original is respected and readers can comfortably assume it as a limiting framework within which the new story will consistently unfold. The elder Jim Hawkins seems to have changed the most, and yet there is license for him to differ, since he was still a boy when the action of Stevenson’s novel closed. Motion makes a convincing case that Jim had trouble “coming home” after his youthful exploits were over, and some of his efforts at “normal” landlubbing life turned to sorrow. His obsession with telling tales from his youth provides familiarity and ensures continuity into this younger generation. And Silver is still Silver. When Jim sees Natty and the captain of the Nightingale so faithfully carrying out John Silver’s bidding, he muses that “the old man’s force of personality was evidently still extraordinary, although his body had almost ceased to be” (p. 115). As Silver’s body atrophied and weakened (symbolically extending his loss of a leg), his personal force was still radiantly alive and powerful. Thus, while crafting the changes to a character in a sequel (or in a prequel, anticipating changes that will solidify in the foundation narrative), the sequel author must choose among those characteristics which are deemed to be defining and central to the character’s personhood in the fictional universe. Motion has done a splendid job of this, and the new characters he has launched—Jim Hawkins, Jr. and Natty Silver—are attractive and complex enough to support their own sequels to this inaugural voyage.

Long John Silver ranks 93rd on The Fictional 100 .

Related posts:

“Elementary” premiere on CBS—a very new Holmes and Watson keep the faith
Coming of Age as a Detective: Sherlock Holmes in “The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I”
Looking for the Beast in “Beastly”: A review of the film

Related links:

Andrew Motion, “ To Be Continued: The Art of the Sequel ,” The New York Times Book Review, August 17, 2012.
James Pope Hennessey, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography , Simon & Schuster, 1974. [an illuminating biography of the creator of Long John Silver]
Treasure Island (2012) [DVD] , starring Eddie Izzard, Donald Sutherland, Elijah Wood, and Toby Regbo. [This adaptation takes some liberties with Stevenson's story but Eddie Izzard's outstanding realization of Long John Silver redeems all]

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Although I planned to write next about Andrew Motion’s Silver, his excellent sequel to Treasure Island, I can’t resist commenting on the premiere episode of “Elementary” on CBS last night, with its inspired pairing of Jonny Lee Miller, as recovering addict Sherlock Holmes, and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, ex-surgeon, now hired by Holmes’s father as a companion to oversee his son’s first months out of rehab.  It is inspired because their chemistry together is strong from the start, both a clash and an attraction of personalities, and not primarily sexual. This clever justification for Watson’s shadowing Holmes’s every move, accompanying him on a case when they have barely met, gives the series a solid premise to build on;  by the end of the first episode, there are already hints that the relationship is growing beyond duty and grudging acceptance to one of mutual interest, usefulness, and even caring.

In his indispensable essay “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes,” Michael Chabon observes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s early Holmes (in the first two novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four) was presented as more resolutely strange and nonconformist. He suggests that Holmes was the product of the same Victorian duality that made a Dorian Gray or Jekyll and Hyde. However, as the author turned to writing his detective short stories, some of these darker traits dropped away and a seemingly more conservative (if never quite conventional) Holmes emerged.

“beginning in 1891 with the first great short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Conan Doyle abandoned most of the louche, Wildean touches with which he had initially encumbered the character of Holmes. The outré personal habits, the vampiric hours, the drug use, the willfully outrageous ignorance of ‘useless facts,’ such as the order of the solar system or contemporary politics, gave way to a more conventional and cozy sort of eccentricity.” (from Chabon’s collected essays, Maps and Legends, p. 33)

Readers may argue how much of this side of Holmes truly dropped away—perhaps it merely receded into the background and emerged when the stresses brought about the necessary conditions (especially true of the drug use).  Most writers and adapters of the characters since Conan Doyle have cherished one or more of these eccentricities in their raw state, and “Elementary” is no exception. Its Holmes has quite literally just emerged from drug rehabilitation and he appears to Watson for the first time in an apparently untamed state—shirtless, unshaven, twitchy, restless, and recalcitrant. While he is dismissing the necessity of Joan Watson’s services as “babysitter,” he is also keen to deductively size her up, almost as a compulsive tic rather than a power play. It is a subtle performance and the generous closeups permit ample appreciation of the restraint  and skill of both actors. Naturally, he talks very, very fast. Both updated Sherlocks—this one in New York and the BBC’s Sherlock in today’s London—operate on the premise that speed of expression and mental powers are perfectly correlated (something I would take issue with, in practice). However, it certainly works as a sign to their Watsons and to their audiences at home that one must snap to, pay attention, and try to keep up!

Owing to his recent treatment, this Holmes is in a somewhat vulnerable state, something he shares with Darlene Cypser’s young Sherlock in her Consulting Detective series. Both are in crisis for medical reasons and both are at odds with a disappointed father.  In “Elementary” it rankles Holmes that upon relocating to New York from London, he must accept living in the “worst” of the several apartments his father owns. Fortunately, solving difficult criminal cases proves highly therapeutic (true for Cypser’s Holmes as well). This is very fortunate for the TV viewer too, because a murder comes in his way very quickly and is admirably resolved within the single episode—I hope this pattern continues, whatever development occurs across episodes for the continuing characters.  Aidan Quinn as Captain Gregson of the NYPD is an outstanding touch, though appearing only briefly, and I hope to see his role grow.

A great deal is accomplished in this first episode. Because their relationship begins on a note of distrust, Holmes and Watson must each win some measure of trust and respect from the other, enough for the relationship to persist until the next episode (and then the next). It is fascinating to see how this Watson wins Holmes’s admiration, and this incident leads to the only uncharacteristic move his character makes—claiming to anticipate an outcome that came as quite a surprise to him. I cannot think of an example in the canon where Holmes deliberately claimed he’d deduced something he hadn’t. (Perhaps others can think of an instance I’ve overlooked.) His admission to Watson about this begins paradoxically to kindle in her a greater faith in him, even if it is only the hope that he is actually human.

Michael Chabon, in the same essay I mentioned earlier, takes Conan Doyle to task for not having enough faith in his own character at the outset, perhaps always underestimating his merit and worth as the greatest project of his life. To me, this matter of faith in Holmes is very central. Conan Doyle’s very ambivalence about Holmes may be one answer to the riddle of why Sherlock Holmes was, is, and has remained so compelling. The drama of Holmes needing to win faith and trust from his clients, from skeptical police, even from the occasional perpetrator, is enacted over and over with each new story and novel in the canon, and again with each new pastiche or fresh realization of the character in film or television. Holmes keeps winning readers’ and viewers’  faith, whether his creator could credit their loyal belief in him or not.  Authors from Conan Doyle onward have Holmes demonstrate his powers with such force and clarity, he makes believers out of skeptics of all description.  A show like “Elementary” really only gets one opening chance to inspire faith that this Holmes can be and do what any “real” Holmes should be and do. Watson is our guide, leading us to wonder and then to believe in him.  In the course of this first episode, Dr. Joan Watson learned enough to stay by her Holmes, and I think viewers will keep returning too.

Reference:

Michael Chabon, “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes” in Maps and Legends. Open Road, 2011 [kindle edition]. (Original work published 2008)

Related post:

Coming of Age as a Detective: Sherlock Holmes in “The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I”

 

Although I planned to write next about Andrew Motion's Silver, his excellent sequel to Treasure Island, I can't resist commenting on the premiere episode of "Elementary" on CBS last night, with its inspired pairing of Jonny Lee Miller, as recovering addict Sherlock Holmes, and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, ex-surgeon, now hired by Holmes's father as a companion to oversee his son's first months out of rehab.  It is inspired because their chemistry together is strong from the start, both a clash and an attraction of personalities, and not primarily sexual. This clever justification for Watson’s shadowing Holmes’s every move, accompanying him on a case when they have barely met, gives the series a solid premise to build on;  by the end of the first episode, there are already hints that the relationship is growing beyond duty and grudging acceptance to one of mutual interest, usefulness, and even caring.

In his indispensable essay “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes,” Michael Chabon observes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s early Holmes (in the first two novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four) was presented as more resolutely strange and nonconformist. He suggests that Holmes was the product of the same Victorian duality that made a Dorian Gray or Jekyll and Hyde. However, as the author turned to writing his detective short stories, some of these darker traits dropped away and a seemingly more conservative (if never quite conventional) Holmes emerged.

“beginning in 1891 with the first great short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Conan Doyle abandoned most of the louche, Wildean touches with which he had initially encumbered the character of Holmes. The outré personal habits, the vampiric hours, the drug use, the willfully outrageous ignorance of ‘useless facts,’ such as the order of the solar system or contemporary politics, gave way to a more conventional and cozy sort of eccentricity.” (from Chabon’s collected essays, Maps and Legends, p. 33)

Readers may argue how much of this side of Holmes truly dropped away—perhaps it merely receded into the background and emerged when the stresses brought about the necessary conditions (especially true of the drug use).  Most writers and adapters of the characters since Conan Doyle have cherished one or more of these eccentricities in their raw state, and “Elementary” is no exception. Its Holmes has quite literally just emerged from drug rehabilitation and he appears to Watson for the first time in an apparently untamed state—shirtless, unshaven, twitchy, restless, and recalcitrant. While he is dismissing the necessity of Joan Watson’s services as “babysitter,” he is also keen to deductively size her up, almost as a compulsive tic rather than a power play. It is a subtle performance and the generous closeups permit ample appreciation of the restraint  and skill of both actors. Naturally, he talks very, very fast. Both updated Sherlocks—this one in New York and the BBC’s Sherlock in today’s London—operate on the premise that speed of expression and mental powers are perfectly correlated (something I would take issue with, in practice). However, it certainly works as a sign to their Watsons and to their audiences at home that one must snap to, pay attention, and try to keep up!

Owing to his recent treatment, this Holmes is in a somewhat vulnerable state, something he shares with Darlene Cypser’s young Sherlock in her Consulting Detective series. Both are in crisis for medical reasons and both are at odds with a disappointed father.  In “Elementary” it rankles Holmes that upon relocating to New York from London, he must accept living in the “worst” of the several apartments his father owns. Fortunately, solving difficult criminal cases proves highly therapeutic (true for Cypser’s Holmes as well). This is very fortunate for the TV viewer too, because a murder comes in his way very quickly and is admirably resolved within the single episode—I hope this pattern continues, whatever development occurs across episodes for the continuing characters.  Aidan Quinn as Captain Gregson of the NYPD is an outstanding touch, though appearing only briefly, and I hope to see his role grow.

A great deal is accomplished in this first episode. Because their relationship begins on a note of distrust, Holmes and Watson must each win some measure of trust and respect from the other, enough for the relationship to persist until the next episode (and then the next). It is fascinating to see how this Watson wins Holmes’s admiration, and this incident leads to the only uncharacteristic move his character makes—claiming to anticipate an outcome that came as quite a surprise to him. I cannot think of an example in the canon where Holmes deliberately claimed he’d deduced something he hadn’t. (Perhaps others can think of an instance I’ve overlooked.) His admission to Watson about this begins paradoxically to kindle in her a greater faith in him, even if it is only the hope that he is actually human.

Michael Chabon, in the same essay I mentioned earlier, takes Conan Doyle to task for not having enough faith in his own character at the outset, perhaps always underestimating his merit and worth as the greatest project of his life. To me, this matter of faith in Holmes is very central. Conan Doyle’s very ambivalence about Holmes may be one answer to the riddle of why Sherlock Holmes was, is, and has remained so compelling. The drama of Holmes needing to win faith and trust from his clients, from skeptical police, even from the occasional perpetrator, is enacted over and over with each new story and novel in the canon, and again with each new pastiche or fresh realization of the character in film or television. Holmes keeps winning readers’ and viewers’  faith, whether his creator could credit their loyal belief in him or not.  Authors from Conan Doyle onward have Holmes demonstrate his powers with such force and clarity, he makes believers out of skeptics of all description.  A show like “Elementary” really only gets one opening chance to inspire faith that this Holmes can be and do what any “real” Holmes should be and do. Watson is our guide, leading us to wonder and then to believe in him.  In the course of this first episode, Dr. Joan Watson learned enough to stay by her Holmes, and I think viewers will keep returning too.

Reference:

Michael Chabon, "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes" in Maps and Legends. Open Road, 2011 [kindle edition]. (Original work published 2008)

Related post:

Coming of Age as a Detective: Sherlock Holmes in "The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I"

 

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The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I: University by Darlene A. Cypser, Foolscap & Quill, 2012.

Following her masterful debut novel, The Crack in the Lens (which I reviewed last year), Darlene Cypser is continuing her psychologically rich Sherlockian prequels in a new Consulting Detective Trilogy.  After young Sherlock’s first run-in with Professor Moriarty (in the previous novel), one which left him bereft of his first love, Violet Rushdale, and almost unhinged from his sanity, the first installment of the trilogy finds him still making only a precarious recovery at home but embarking nevertheless on his university studies at Cambridge, where he must cope with further dramatic events that will form his character and fully reveal his life’s purpose.

The budding field of psychiatry as a branch of medicine is beginning to make its appearance in the latter part of the century, and Cypser takes full advantage of the possibilities in the early chapters of the novel.  Sherlock continues to be physically and emotionally at his lowest ebb as the novel begins. He is suffering from flashbacks of Violet’s death and a cycle of obsessive recrimination and anxiety that we would not hesitate to label post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, today. But more than 100 years ago, a sufferer risked commitment in an asylum that had little hope to offer except for palliative physical care, restraint from self-harm, and the rudiments of counseling for the lucky few who encountered a capable doctor.  While Sherlock struggled at home, he began receiving visits from Dr Mackenzie, one such capable doctor summoned from the asylum to consult about Sherlock’s condition. While Moriarty was nemesis to Sherlock in the first book, in this new novel, Dr Mackenzie fills the role of an anti-Moriarty, proving to be not only a trusted physician but a crucial ally and mentor as Sherlock’s attraction to the sciences—and the science of detection—increases.

However, the doctor’s experimental remedy for Sherlock’s “traumatic neurasthenia,” namely, an injected solution of cocaine, will dog him throughout his life, first as blessing, and then as a persistent and secret curse. But here, in the beginning, it served its purpose, suppressing his anxiety and panic attacks, while fueling his intellectual excitement:  “Sherlock’s loquaciousness [on the train with Mycroft for a holiday] varied as the influence of the drug varied, fading out as it did. His true nature lay somewhere between the extremes” (p. 113).

The novel hits its stride as Sherlock barely begins to find his, as a new member of Sidney Sussex College, which is pictured in foreboding darkness on the book’s attractive cover.  And darkness is surely still haunting Sherlock as he begins his studies in mathematics, living out of college in private rooms. His panic attacks can still be triggered by anything that reminds him of Violet’s death (such as an early snowfall) or unduly taxes his nerves. Fortunately, he has a capable and devoted companion in young Jonathan Beckwith, who accompanies his charge to Cambridge as servant, as fencing pupil and partner (when Sherlock is strong enough), but above all as Sherlock’s only friend, besides Dr. Mackenzie, for many months of self-imposed isolation.  (Jonathan is so engaging and colorful a character that Cypser has announced plans for another mystery trilogy from his point of view.)

Ironically, Sherlock’s first close friendship at university, with classmate Victor Trevor, begins quite unpromisingly with a dangerous bite from Trevor’s dog. (We also glimpse the aloof Reginald Musgrave and his coolness to Holmes.)  But the friendship with Victor develops rapidly during Sherlock’s convalescence; he visits daily and introduces Sherlock to pipe-smoking, which incidentally provides a stimulant and practical alternative to cocaine. At this point, Cypser deftly interpolates her own retelling of “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” from the Conan Doyle canon; as it is told retrospectively by Holmes, this account intersects with the chronology of Cypser’s story of Holmes’s university days. While he spends a holiday with Victor Trevor and Trevor’s father, events precipitate his first solution of a mystery, one calling forth the unique observational and deductive skills he has already demonstrated casually to the amazement of his classmates. But the stakes soon rise to life and death, and Holmes begins to see—as he later affirms—“perhaps I’m not your average man.” He is destined to pursue no average calling but to create his own profession, as the world’s first consulting detective.

It is the business of this novel to unfold for us Sherlock’s early exercise of talent in a new mystery at the university (which I won’t reveal), as well as his change of academic  direction, suiting all his studies to those sciences which will inform and develop his detection skills and build his arsenal of knowledge.  Though not aiming to become a police detective, he is fascinated by police detectives’ work and gets into some nasty scrapes trying to observe it first hand, much too closely for their comfort.  With his prodigious memory, he begins to be a serious student of crime and collects accounts of it. Mycroft sends him clippings from the London papers, and with satisfaction, the reader watches the genesis of his alphabetic file of crime reports, which will come in handy so often, tantalize the reader with names and cases Watson hasn’t yet narrated, and fill Mrs. Hudson with consternation when the mass of riffled clippings is strewn everywhere at 221b… 

But all that lies in the future. For now, Sherlock is a young man not quite 20 who must deal with authority figures still wielding much power over his life, whether they are university officials or his own implacable father. It is also the business of this novel to show how he will assert his own choice and begin to follow his “line in life”—which will also be his lifeline, drawing him back from his darkest moods.

In a recent New York Times essay, “The Art of the Sequel,” author Andrew Motion considered the proliferation of literary sequels and prequels,  even including an  “I, Sherlock Holmes”  on his facetious list of typical sequel titles. Based on his analysis of some of the most effective sequels, such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a sequel to Hamlet) or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (a prequel to Jane Eyre), he offered some pointers to would-be fashioners of such works.  Although it is a tremendous advantage that the characters are already familiar, and possibly beloved, a successful sequel or prequel “allows us to think afresh about characters whose fame can otherwise make them feel inaccessible to new interpretations.”  In other words, it should attempt to add something more to what we already know about them, perhaps surprise us by its revelations, even when we believe we already know a character—say, a complex hero such as Holmes—very well indeed.  Moreover, sequel-writing presupposes a certain playfulness, artfully inserting familiar references, while deploying ingenuity to put the character to a new test. No matter how much we revere a character, Motion argues, “something more than imitation is far more honoring.”

Both of Darlene Cypser’s Sherlockian prequels to date fulfill these criteria.  Her pastiches are not imitation but exploration, and she shows the confidence and command of the canon which enable her to inquire more deeply into Holmes’s formative psychology.  Her latest novel has the hallmarks of a true bildungsroman—a coming-of-age novel—about a sensitive protagonist, often a youngest son, who suffers loss and undergoes a series of difficult trials that lead to mastery of self and ultimately to maturity.  It can encompass education or other training disciplines, artistic development, and apprenticeships (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship being the classic example). At the end, the hero understands himself better, knows how he might move beyond self to contribute to the world, and is both ready and equipped to do it.

Through psychological insight, swift movement of the plot via effective dialogue, and consistent characterization, Cypser has fashioned a bildungsroman for young Sherlock with great skill.  As goddessinsepia writes, with her usual grace and clear perception,

“By the end of Cypser’s second novel, the reader stands in full knowledge and awareness of the man before them, and you wonder how you missed it, so understated was his development. Where previously there was only the merest hint of the man that would become the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes now stands tall, assembled, if not yet fully-formed.”  [See the rest of her insightful review at her blog Better Holmes and Gardens]

My interest and absorption in this story never flagged, a tribute to Cypser’s high level of craft.  I also enjoyed her humor, for example, when a fellow student observed Sherlock’s easy victory over an opponent who had challenged him to a match with unfamiliar fencing sticks, the bemused spectator remarked, “I don’t think the weapon matters. Holmes could probably thrash any of us with a teaspoon.”  This first installment of The Consulting Detective Trilogy works as mystery fiction, but more than that, it emerges as a fully rounded novel of Sherlock Holmes.

*Note: FTC disclosure. I received a complimentary review copy of this novel. The opinions I’ve expressed are, of course, my own.

In my next post, I will review Andrew Motion’s own sequel, Silver: Return to Treasure Island .

Related post:

On Sherlock Holmes and Superman: Catching Them at the Crossroads

Further links:

The Consulting Detective Trilogy—Excerpts
BOOK REVIEW: “The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I: University [goddessinsepia’s review]

 

 

 

The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I: University by Darlene A. Cypser, Foolscap & Quill, 2012.

Following her masterful debut novel, The Crack in the Lens (which I reviewed last year), Darlene Cypser is continuing her psychologically rich Sherlockian prequels in a new Consulting Detective Trilogy.  After young Sherlock’s first run-in with Professor Moriarty (in the previous novel), one which left him bereft of his first love, Violet Rushdale, and almost unhinged from his sanity, the first installment of the trilogy finds him still making only a precarious recovery at home but embarking nevertheless on his university studies at Cambridge, where he must cope with further dramatic events that will form his character and fully reveal his life’s purpose.

The budding field of psychiatry as a branch of medicine is beginning to make its appearance in the latter part of the century, and Cypser takes full advantage of the possibilities in the early chapters of the novel.  Sherlock continues to be physically and emotionally at his lowest ebb as the novel begins. He is suffering from flashbacks of Violet’s death and a cycle of obsessive recrimination and anxiety that we would not hesitate to label post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, today. But more than 100 years ago, a sufferer risked commitment in an asylum that had little hope to offer except for palliative physical care, restraint from self-harm, and the rudiments of counseling for the lucky few who encountered a capable doctor.  While Sherlock struggled at home, he began receiving visits from Dr Mackenzie, one such capable doctor summoned from the asylum to consult about Sherlock’s condition. While Moriarty was nemesis to Sherlock in the first book, in this new novel, Dr Mackenzie fills the role of an anti-Moriarty, proving to be not only a trusted physician but a crucial ally and mentor as Sherlock’s attraction to the sciences—and the science of detection—increases.

However, the doctor’s experimental remedy for Sherlock’s “traumatic neurasthenia,” namely, an injected solution of cocaine, will dog him throughout his life, first as blessing, and then as a persistent and secret curse. But here, in the beginning, it served its purpose, suppressing his anxiety and panic attacks, while fueling his intellectual excitement:  “Sherlock’s loquaciousness [on the train with Mycroft for a holiday] varied as the influence of the drug varied, fading out as it did. His true nature lay somewhere between the extremes” (p. 113).

The novel hits its stride as Sherlock barely begins to find his, as a new member of Sidney Sussex College, which is pictured in foreboding darkness on the book’s attractive cover.  And darkness is surely still haunting Sherlock as he begins his studies in mathematics, living out of college in private rooms. His panic attacks can still be triggered by anything that reminds him of Violet’s death (such as an early snowfall) or unduly taxes his nerves. Fortunately, he has a capable and devoted companion in young Jonathan Beckwith, who accompanies his charge to Cambridge as servant, as fencing pupil and partner (when Sherlock is strong enough), but above all as Sherlock’s only friend, besides Dr. Mackenzie, for many months of self-imposed isolation.  (Jonathan is so engaging and colorful a character that Cypser has announced plans for another mystery trilogy from his point of view.)

Ironically, Sherlock’s first close friendship at university, with classmate Victor Trevor, begins quite unpromisingly with a dangerous bite from Trevor’s dog. (We also glimpse the aloof Reginald Musgrave and his coolness to Holmes.)  But the friendship with Victor develops rapidly during Sherlock’s convalescence; he visits daily and introduces Sherlock to pipe-smoking, which incidentally provides a stimulant and practical alternative to cocaine. At this point, Cypser deftly interpolates her own retelling of “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” from the Conan Doyle canon; as it is told retrospectively by Holmes, this account intersects with the chronology of Cypser’s story of Holmes’s university days. While he spends a holiday with Victor Trevor and Trevor’s father, events precipitate his first solution of a mystery, one calling forth the unique observational and deductive skills he has already demonstrated casually to the amazement of his classmates. But the stakes soon rise to life and death, and Holmes begins to see—as he later affirms—“perhaps I’m not your average man.” He is destined to pursue no average calling but to create his own profession, as the world’s first consulting detective.

It is the business of this novel to unfold for us Sherlock’s early exercise of talent in a new mystery at the university (which I won’t reveal), as well as his change of academic  direction, suiting all his studies to those sciences which will inform and develop his detection skills and build his arsenal of knowledge.  Though not aiming to become a police detective, he is fascinated by police detectives’ work and gets into some nasty scrapes trying to observe it first hand, much too closely for their comfort.  With his prodigious memory, he begins to be a serious student of crime and collects accounts of it. Mycroft sends him clippings from the London papers, and with satisfaction, the reader watches the genesis of his alphabetic file of crime reports, which will come in handy so often, tantalize the reader with names and cases Watson hasn’t yet narrated, and fill Mrs. Hudson with consternation when the mass of riffled clippings is strewn everywhere at 221b… 

But all that lies in the future. For now, Sherlock is a young man not quite 20 who must deal with authority figures still wielding much power over his life, whether they are university officials or his own implacable father. It is also the business of this novel to show how he will assert his own choice and begin to follow his “line in life”—which will also be his lifeline, drawing him back from his darkest moods.

In a recent New York Times essay, “The Art of the Sequel,” author Andrew Motion considered the proliferation of literary sequels and prequels,  even including an  “I, Sherlock Holmes”  on his facetious list of typical sequel titles. Based on his analysis of some of the most effective sequels, such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a sequel to Hamlet) or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (a prequel to Jane Eyre), he offered some pointers to would-be fashioners of such works.  Although it is a tremendous advantage that the characters are already familiar, and possibly beloved, a successful sequel or prequel “allows us to think afresh about characters whose fame can otherwise make them feel inaccessible to new interpretations.”  In other words, it should attempt to add something more to what we already know about them, perhaps surprise us by its revelations, even when we believe we already know a character—say, a complex hero such as Holmes—very well indeed.  Moreover, sequel-writing presupposes a certain playfulness, artfully inserting familiar references, while deploying ingenuity to put the character to a new test. No matter how much we revere a character, Motion argues, “something more than imitation is far more honoring.”

Both of Darlene Cypser’s Sherlockian prequels to date fulfill these criteria.  Her pastiches are not imitation but exploration, and she shows the confidence and command of the canon which enable her to inquire more deeply into Holmes’s formative psychology.  Her latest novel has the hallmarks of a true bildungsroman—a coming-of-age novel—about a sensitive protagonist, often a youngest son, who suffers loss and undergoes a series of difficult trials that lead to mastery of self and ultimately to maturity.  It can encompass education or other training disciplines, artistic development, and apprenticeships (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship being the classic example). At the end, the hero understands himself better, knows how he might move beyond self to contribute to the world, and is both ready and equipped to do it.

Through psychological insight, swift movement of the plot via effective dialogue, and consistent characterization, Cypser has fashioned a bildungsroman for young Sherlock with great skill.  As goddessinsepia writes, with her usual grace and clear perception,

“By the end of Cypser’s second novel, the reader stands in full knowledge and awareness of the man before them, and you wonder how you missed it, so understated was his development. Where previously there was only the merest hint of the man that would become the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes now stands tall, assembled, if not yet fully-formed.”  [See the rest of her insightful review at her blog Better Holmes and Gardens]

My interest and absorption in this story never flagged, a tribute to Cypser’s high level of craft.  I also enjoyed her humor, for example, when a fellow student observed Sherlock’s easy victory over an opponent who had challenged him to a match with unfamiliar fencing sticks, the bemused spectator remarked, “I don’t think the weapon matters. Holmes could probably thrash any of us with a teaspoon.”  This first installment of The Consulting Detective Trilogy works as mystery fiction, but more than that, it emerges as a fully rounded novel of Sherlock Holmes.

*Note: FTC disclosure. I received a complimentary review copy of this novel. The opinions I’ve expressed are, of course, my own.

In my next post, I will review Andrew Motion’s own sequel, Silver: Return to Treasure Island .

Related post:

On Sherlock Holmes and Superman: Catching Them at the Crossroads

Further links:

The Consulting Detective Trilogy—Excerpts
BOOK REVIEW: “The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part I: University [goddessinsepia’s review]

 

 

 

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