Holmes's Darkest Case, and the Best Post-Doyle Holmes Book Yet - A Review of The House of Silk

The House of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Anyone who has been following my reviews so far knows that I love a good mystery, and I love Sherlock Holmes. Ever since I first read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was twelve, I have been irrevocably hooked on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories and this most famous and quintessential of detectives. Dupin and Poirot fans are free to look at me askance; I know that Poirot is important to the development of the mystery genre as a whole, and Dupin is the template upon which Holmes is based, but they cannot displace Holmes in my regard and affection. Childhood bias? Perhaps. I did not encounter Dupin until I was fourteen, and Poirot until I was sixteen. By then I had been reading Holmes for a good long while, and could not help but compare Poirot and Dupin to him.

Holmes, in essence, took on a life of his own in my imagination - something which happens to all the best characters, I think. And when a character does just that, said character is no longer restricted to the works of the author that created it. This is why there are so many stories about Holmes not written by Doyle - some of them good, and some of them bad. The last book (or set of books, really) that I read in this vein is The Game by Laurie R. King, which is part of a series of books about Holmes' finding partnership (and love!) with a woman named Mary Russell, who also happens to be his intellectual equal. But I had gotten rather tired of this series, and so have taken a break from it - and from all things Holmes, actually.

That is, of course, until I stumbled on The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz. At first I was ready to bypass it for now as another Holmes pastiche, but put on the brakes when I found out that it is an "official" Holmes book - official in the sense that it is licensed by the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. Essentially, this is a "canonical" Holmes story, the first, if I am not mistaken, since Doyle passed away. And just because of that, I moved it to the top of my reading list, and as soon as I finished reading Cherie Priest's Boneshaker (the last book I read and reviewed), I dove straight (and happily) into this one.

The House of Silk is narrated by Dr. John Watson, now at the end of his life, and simply waiting to pass into the next one. He has recorded faithfully all the adventures and cases he and his friend Sherlock Holmes have encountered together in their long friendship, but he has one more case he wishes to put down, one last story to tell before he passes away. It's rather difficult for me to pin down when, precisely, in the chronology of Holmes stories the events of the House of Silk take place, but I am quite certain that it occurs before the events at the Reichenbach Falls, and after the events of The Red-Headed League. Those who have a more recent memory of the Holmes stories will be able to fit it into the chronology more accurately than I can, I am sure.

Whatever the case may be, Watson explains that he could not write this story until this, the last few moments of his life, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that he promised a host of people he would not write of it until the very last because of their involvement in it. But the primary reason that Watson gives is that the nature of the crime itself is so heinous that writing about it so soon after the events of the crime took place, even if he did not choose to publish it, was a far too difficult task. And while the distance in terms of time have made the writing of it somewhat easier, the recollection of those events is not any easier on Watson. But he must tell it, and so he does.

And Watson is very much right: the crime is indeed heinous - at least, in comparison to all the other crimes documented in the other Holmes stories. No doubt murder is heinous, but the particular nature of the crime at the center of The House of Silk is understandably disturbing enough for men of Holmes and Watson's time that it comes as no surprise Watson would want to distance himself from it, at least for a certain amount of time. A sex ring masquerading as a school for street children, whose clientele are wealthy pedophiles with a taste for young boys, is no unique thing to the twenty-first century reader; but it is entirely conceivable that such a thing would have been utterly appalling to both Watson and Holmes. Such a thing, had it been discovered in Victorian London, would have been sensational, especially if the type of clientele welcomed at the establishment had been made known.

While I do not doubt it is entirely possible such a thing did indeed exist in actual history, the fact of the matter is that such a crime, such a story, is not a part of the traditional Holmes canon; in fact, in a concluding essay to the copy I have, Horowitz makes it clear that even murder was a rather infrequent crime in the Holmes and Watson case files. So though I, as a reader of mysteries and a child of my time, finds the crime rather underwhelming in terms of shock value, I also know enough of Holmes canon and of Victorian London itself to know how utterly diabolical the nature of this crime would seem to people of that time and age. Then again, I do not read Holmes stories for their shock value, as that is not their point.

Something that might strike the reader within the first few pages is the tone of Watson's narrative voice. It seems a little off-kilter somehow, like this is not the Watson we readers know and remember from the original stories. This should come as no surprise, since Doyle isn't the one writing it, and no matter how faithful Horowitz tries to be to Doyle's tone, he can never truly capture it, simply because he is not Doyle. But this is hardly a negative thing, for although Horowitz is not pitch-perfect Doyle, he does remain faithful to the spirit of Doyle's originals, and that is far more than I could ask for, considering the other works out there that don't even stick to that one basic rule.

And now that I speak of Watson, it must be said that, although this is a Sherlock Holmes story beyond a doubt, I rather think that this is more about Watson than anything else, and I mean this beyond the fact that he is the narrator. There is a point in the story wherein Sherlock is removed from the story, and Watson is left out on his own to figure things out. He manages to do well on his own, with some help from Lestrade (Mycroft, surprisingly enough, has his hands tied earlier in the novel, and so is of no help) and one of his discoveries does eventually lead to crucial information. It is during this part of the novel that the other characters - yes, even Lestrade - get a chance to shine. I rather appreciate Horowitz taking the time out to give the other characters this chance, since Doyle so very rarely lets them do so.

I am especially pleased with the way Lestrade was written here. In the Doyle stories he tends to get the short end of the stick, and Watson (as the ostensible narrator of those stories) does admit this in the course of the narration. Horowitz's version of Lestrade is still very true to Doyle's, but with a far more human face.

One other character makes a crucial appearance in this novel, and it was this appearance that was truly one of the highlights for me. Although one of the reader's first instincts is to pin this whole affair on Moriarty, it turns out that he was not his idea - especially since he tells Watson precisely that in a scene reminiscent in its intensity to some of the most famous confrontation scenes in the Doyle originals. While Moriarty does not give Watson his name, it becomes clear very early on just who Watson is talking to. Horowitz's characterization of Moriarty is incredibly enjoyable to read, despite the fact that he appears for only a brief moment in the course of the novel. It emphasizes the fact that Moriarty is truly Holmes's polar opposite: sharing all of Holmes's genius, and even his morals, because although Moriarty is a criminal (he even uses the word to describe himself in his conversation with Watson) he does have a code of behavior, and what the House of Silk does is beyond the pale even for someone like him.

All told, The House of Silk is an excellent addition to the Holmes canon. It has all the hallmarks of an excellent Holmes story, and a little something extra, besides. While it is rather longer than the novels Doyle wrote about Holmes (The Sign of Four being my favorite novel, and my absolute favorite Holmes story), I do think the scale of the story requires the extra length. After all, this crime is something extraordinary and horrific, quite unlike the other cases Holmes and Watson has encountered before. Fortunately, Horowitz does Holmes and Watson and all of a Holmes fan's favorite characters justice, and maybe someday soon, he'll be asked to write about them again. I definitely look forward to that.

So Awesome, I Finished It in a Day - A Review of In the Garden of Iden

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As I write this review I get the sense of having hit some kind of record. It has been a long time, a very long time, since I managed to finish a book within a day. It was easy to do so when I was younger, when I had more time to do focus almost exclusively on reading for pleasure and schoolwork wasn't much of a chore, but recent years (and, perhaps, training) have slowed my pace down considerably. An enjoyable novel takes perhaps two to four days of reading between work and other things that need doing to finish.

And yet here I am, composing a review for Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden, having reached this point only after having started it sometime after lunch today. And it must be said, I am rather blown away by the book itself. It's taking some self-control not to just abandon writing this review to read the next book, skipping all the other books in my planned reading list along the way.

The Garden of Iden, the first book in The Company series, combines two of my favorite genres: sci-fi and historical fiction. I truly do love both, even separately, but what lured me towards Kage Baker's series was the fact that it combined those two genres, creating a way to explore one of my favorite sci-fi subgenres: time travel. I have loved the concept of time travel since I saw Back to the Future (I am a child of the eighties, so sue me), and have read whatever I can on the subject, including the wonderful works of Madeleine L'Engle and the novel Timeline by Michael Crichton.

Kage Baker's world, however, is unique, and can hardly be compared to L'Engle's works or even to Crichton's novel. In Baker's version of the world, immortality and time travel have been discovered in the 24th century - and one could not have come about without the other, because the developer of immortality, Dr. Zeus, needed a means of testing immortality out, and as a result, time travel was created. What would happen was that agents of Dr. Zeus's Company would be sent back in time, select a suitable specimen from the population of that time, make them immortal, and then the agents would come back to the present time, and see if their subject survived. If said subject survived, then the procedure definitely worked.

Except, as is often the case with many scientific experiments, one does not get the desired result immediately. This results in repetitions of the experiment until the perfect procedure is found that creates the best results with the least amount of flaws. And so Dr. Zeus's agents kept on going back into the past, making more and more subjects immortal, until they perfected the procedure.

But what then? What to do with all these immortals? What to do with the procedure itself? Another ingenious solution was created: since in the present of the Company, a great many things had been lost, the Company would use the now-perfected immortality procedure, handpick appropriate subjects from all points of history (going all the way back to the Stone Age, in some cases), and make them immortal. Once this had been done, the new immortals would be taken to special schools, where they would receive a superior education and proper indoctrination, and they would become agents of the Company, deployed into different points of history to acquire anything the Company might deem valuable. But since nothing from the past can be brought forward into the present, any new acquisitions must be stashed in safe places until they may be retrieved in the present. Invaluable artwork, the texts of the Library of Alexandria, and even extinct species are retrieved in such a manner. And the Company makes money from it all.

A part of this grand scheme is Mendoza, a young agent who was once a child rescued from the Inquisition by another agent. Now a fully-trained botanist, she is sent to England in the sixteenth century, on a mission to recover specimens of plants that will go completely extinct in only a few more centuries, if not within the century itself. While there, she meets a young man named Nicholas Harpole, and falls in love - an event that promises to reverberate in any books involving Mendoza further down the line.

It's difficult to talk about this book, to explain why I find it so good, without giving too much of it away. It involves time-traveling near-immortal beings, who are just as human as the rest of us for all their belief that they are not. Mendoza is a great example of this: in falling in love with Harpole, she shows herself to be as vulnerable emotionally as the "mortals" she finds so contemptible. Although it might be tempting to scoff at this aspect of the novel, to write it off as a romance-novel plotline (not that there is anything wrong with romance novels or their plots, under the right circumstances, of course), but Baker plays their relationship very well. It is sweet, true, and quite romantic, but it is real. The fact that their relationship is doomed right from the very beginning - because how can an immortal and a mortal really have a proper relationship? - adds to that romance. Every attempt Mendoza makes to save Harpole from his inevitable death only highlights this tragedy more. It is tempting to make comparisons to Romeo and Juliet, but it isn't quite appropriate, as Mendoza and Harpole's relationship is hardly as stormy as that. Besides, Shakespeare was not even around at the time this story takes place.

Another interesting aspect of this novel - perhaps because of the time and place it occurs - is what it says about religion and history, and the great damage that deeds done in the name of the former can do to the latter, particularly on the level of individual people. As a child, Mendoza was a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, and the memories of her time under their "care" often trigger terrible nightmares that cause her to wake up screaming. She, like all of the Company's immortal agents, are skeptical of religion, and many are intolerant of anything resembling religious bigotry. And yet, interestingly enough, she carries on a relationship with Harpole, who is a religious zealot. In the end, part of the tragedy of their relationship is that Harpole is unable to accept Mendoza for what she is, and he chooses his beliefs over his love for her, even when she comes to rescue him from being burned at the stake.

But I think what I enjoyed the most about this novel - and what made it go by so quickly - is Mendoza's tone, and the tone used by her fellow immortals. There were many times that I found myself chuckling aloud, mostly because Mendoza's insights, and the commentary provided by her fellow immortals, was amusing in the way that good witty, sarcastic banter is amusing. It felt like I was listening to one of my good friends tell a story, so close was Mendoza's tone to the one used by many of my friends in real life, and there was a lot of pleasure to be had in that.

It's truly difficult to talk about this book without resorting to simply repeating the phrase "Fantastic!" over and over again. It is mostly set-up, I suppose, for the other novels to come, an introduction to the world Baker has created, but what an introduction it is! Few series start with such a powerful opening, and while I will be reading other books before moving on to the next novel of this series, when I can finally pick up the next novel it will most definitely be with eagerness for the adventure to come.