Before realising that seeing its mysteries solved won't give you whatever it was you were longing for, Anthony Horowitz's new novel, The House of Silk, is a perfectly diverting Sherlock Holmes adventure.
THE HOUSE OF SILK: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz 320 pp, 2011 Orion, 953 baht. Available at Kinokuniya.
Commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate, Horowitz's contribution to the Holmes apocrypha benefits from what Alex Rider, his best-selling YA teen spy novels, and his fine Foyle's War taught him about crafting artful and clever genre dramas.
He's a dexterous prose stylist, Mr Horowitz. The House of Silk isn't terribly obsequious, nor does it play too fast and loose with Conan Doyle's canon and spirit, unlike certain recent bombastic, steampunk silliness at the multiplex. Horowitz has crafted a consummately entertaining and functional Holmes tale, but the novel is still strangely unsatisfying, and stranger, disquieting.
An elderly Dr John Watson, alone with memories of his years as friend and chronicler of the great detective, decides that he must set down a last untold Holmes story _ one "too monstrous, too shocking" to have been published before. A rather benign tale of a flat-capped man loitering (yes, mysteriously) at the gate of an art dealer's Wimbledon villa soon descends into a succession of increasingly brutal murders across Victorian London. From 221B Baker Street to a grange for homeless boys, an opium den to stately manors, a prison to a perilous wunderkabinet, Holmes and Watson's pursuit of the first mystery entangles them in the final unsettling problem of the House of Silk.
Historian Simon Schama lambasted Downton Abbey, the hit TV programme, for engaging in "cultural necrophilia", fulfilling audiences' unhealthy desire for an unreal past. A not dissimilar nostalgic lust hangs about Horowitz's storytelling. The novel is an Instagram portrait of London given a certain Conan Doyle filter: the city fetor prettied by gaslight, the Street Arabs' poverty eroticised. To dwell too heavily on what's standard fare for such aestheticised period pieces might seem a bit killjoy. But, when Horowitz finally outs the House of Silk's gilded depravity, the stylised nightmare of our passage through London's netherworlds takes on a different character.
Of course pulp fiction thrillers trade on sex and violence, the allure of vice. And the original Conan Doyle stories had their fair portion of murder, grotesquerie. But the particular nastiness Horowitz chooses as his denouement _however stock it may be in fiction and film _ is played cheaply. It's an easy vileness, and Horowitz doesn't really own it (even when he has his Sherlock return to exact a bit of against-type, cathartic requital at the scene of the crime). The wrong itself remains unpainted, unexamined. The novel's failure to look its victims in the eye makes our complicity as readers equally easy, unsettling.
Maybe it's mean spirited to raise cavils against a literary pastiche of this kind, against The House of Silk's species of page turner, such a cracking good yarn. Maybe Horowitz _ writing after the fashion of Conan Doyle pretending, in turn, to be Watson _ knows this particular ventriloquism too well. Maybe it's not Horowitz's moral cowardice, but Watson's Victorian decorum that won't let reality get drawn too real.
Maybe, as David Foster Wallace once suggested, there are limits to what an interested critic can ask of an interested author, an interested reader. Maybe it's just easier to go for the facile CSI: Crime Scene Investigation kill, without dwelling too long on the consequences. Maybe that's what we want from a detective story.
So I'm not gonna tell you whodunnit. Or how Holmes solves the yoked adventures of the man in the flat cap and the House of Silk. It's a detective story after all, and it's a perfectly good one. Read it for yourself on a long flight or during a few hungover days at the beach. You'll probably enjoy it, and probably leave it _ not quite satisfied _ on the hotel lobby bookshelf alongside abandoned copies of Die Bourne Identitat and Harry Potter och Fangen Fran Azkaban. But if you're not quite satisfied and the pastiche sends you back, maybe for the first time, to the original stories, to A Study in Scarlet or The Red-Headed League, you'll enjoy what extra hours you have with Conan Doyle's Sherlock.
You may have noticed we haven't really talked about Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is hardly here. He plays his tricks of deduction, surprises Watson with (somewhat) astonishing revelations, magicians his way out of a scrape or two. So, yes, Horowitz kits out Holmes as Holmes. But whatever it is _ his misanthropy? eccentric vainglory? _ that makes the detective's ethos so compelling in Conan Doyle's best stories is missing here. Here, Horowitz's dexterity, his ability to magic himself into a genre style _ precisely what serves him so well in his teen espionage and fantasy adventures and television dramas _ keeps him from being able to get inside Holmes and take possession of him. Some say that for a writer, penning a Sherlock Holmes story is like getting to play the lead in Hamlet. Here, however, the actor playing the Prince of Denmark knows his lines and blocking and he looks good in the tights, but he just doesn't complete the transmutation into Hamlet himself.
But Watson is a different matter. In spite of these frustrations, I will say that Horowitz manages to uncover, even if by accident, a truth about Dr Watson I'd never fully considered. In Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock quips to Watson, perhaps a bit cruelly, "I am lost without my Boswell". (On the BBC's excellent Sherlock, set in contemporary London, this is updated to the toying snark, "I'd be lost without my blogger.") Reading Horowitz, and then revisiting Conan Doyle's classic stories, it comes into focus just how much Watson _ like Samuel Johnson's biographer, James Boswell _ isn't the hero of his own life.
In The House of Silk, Horowitz inhabits a man who, at the end of his days, is trying to write himself a larger role _ not in one of the adventures, but in his own life. Purposely or not, Horowitz succeeds at giving us a portrait _ indeed, a self-portrait _ of the rather pitiable, diminished thing it must have been to be Dr John Watson.
It's hardly worth asking why writers and directors and actors and, yes, readers keep returning to Sherlock, rejuvenating him. He's good fun, good fiction. But how do we read each attempt? Maybe we can only measure them against our own sense of Holmes, our own sense of what we want from one of Watson's chronicles. I almost don't want to hold Horowitz responsible for my disappointment when The House of Silk's mysteries are revealed. But seeing a mystery solved usually dashes a hope that something else was possible, something else might be discovered, something just beyond what we can articulate, something actually surprising, and thus, a revelation.
