Book Review: The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet; also known as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years by Jamyang Norbu
Many novels and stories have been written by a variety of writers using the character of Sherlock Holmes. I have read none of these by other authors than the original until now. However, when I was young I read with delight almost all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about the uniquely methodical and logical detective. I came across a passage about The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes in a book about novels from various countries around the world. It attracted my interest because it is set in South Asia, an area that has long fascinated me and where I lived for ten years. Because Norbu is a Tibetan writer, the novel carries a strong sense of verisimilitude.
If you are familiar with the Holmes saga, you are aware that Doyle, having decided that his “literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel” decided to kill off his heroic detective in “The Final Problem.” In this story, Holmes has a last confrontation with his archenemy Professor Moriarty and they both fall to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls. Doyle’s readers were devastated and outraged. Tens of thousands of them cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine in protest. After a hiatus of just a few years, Doyle resumed writing stories about his idiosyncratic detective. To account for the years from the incident at the falls until Holmes resumes his career, there are only a few lines in a story called “The Empty House.” Holmes tells his biographer Dr. Watson: “I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa and spending some days with the head Lama.”
This novel, then, offers an account of what happened during those years when Holmes had disappeared from the British public’s eye. It is told from the viewpoint of the East’s equivalent of Watson, a Bengali by the name of Huree Chunder Mookerjee, who is in fact a character taken from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. Mookerjee is involved in the espionage intrigue that Kipling, in his novel, refers to as “the great game,” and he becomes Holmes’s assistant as well as his biographer. It seems that deadly assassins loyal to Moriarty are still on Holmes’s trail and intend to do him in. Holmes, meanwhile, is determined to make his way, for reasons that become apparent as the novel progresses, to Tibet. Mookerjee meets up with Holmes in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), and together they travel to Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, with Moriarty’s henchmen hot on their heels. Eventually, at the invitation of the Dalai Lama, they undertake a trek through the Himalayan Mountains to Tibet.
I don’t want to give too much away, because this is a rousing good adventure tale. The allusions to Doyle’s and Kipling’s writings are fun, and Norbu’s familiarity with Tibet and its culture add depth and nuance. The author has even added a fantasy element to the tale, which caused me to recall times of yore when I would become absorbed in amazing tales of lost civilizations by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and others. Escapism is what it is, with larger than life characters grappling with evil in exotic locales. It would make a fun movie along the lines of Indiana Jones. In the meantime, find a copy somewhere and give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.
