Review: The Final Solution

The Final Solution is Michael Chabon’s homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s a delightful short novel with a once-famous but never-named sleuth, now an elderly bee-keeper, drawn into a mystery involving a mute Jewish boy and his African Gray Parrot. In Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, almost the whole business is the powerful tidiness of rational deduction, as all the disparate pieces are put together with logic ribbon tied neatly in a bow. In Chabon’s take, the detective is old and diminished, and there is a touch of nostalgia to the story if not the person:

Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the empire.

Chabon has been criticized by reviewers for neglecting the tidy logical forms of the mystery, and he has been criticized for letting his prose run away with the story. It is clear, however, that this is a Chabon story and not a Doyle story. Chabon’s incredible talent is in his command of language, and the ineluctable rhythms of a long sentence. He gives us a Holmes finally aware of his limitations, and of the limitations of rationality and logic. He gives us a story with subtle allusions to heavier things yet unknown to England of the day. Only the boy and the bird knows, and it has turned the boy quiet. The bird sings of things it doesn’t understand. And so do we.