Take a bow, Sherlock Holmes. His Last Bow by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Spoiler ahead. Best you enjoy the book first.
After slowly working my way through all Sherlock Holmes books written by Doyle (let’s not mention the imitators), I’ve finally read the last pages of Holmes’ adventures, and I finally realised, being a foolish reader as I was that Holmes’ stories are exactly what the titles alludes them to: adventures. Far from crime / mystery / thriller, the Sherlock Holmes stories are mere escapism and adventure storis and therefore they are best enjoyed as such.
Readers who would try to pick apart the stories to resolve the novel to a tee before he comes to the resolution would be disappointed. Perhaps he would have conjectured the general line of what could have happened, but it’s impossible to pick up every detail, impossible to know what sort of exotic concoction to explain the strange cases and disturbing consequences. It is best to read the stories as they are, holding firm Doyle’s hands, and suspend your sense of belief on Holmes’ genius.
If you start to examine the details as Holmes would, there are inevitable cracks in the foundations. How are we supposed to know of an obscure root from an African tribe which might cause death and delirium? How are we to know that the lodger in Wisteria Lodge was politically involved in an obscure country? The list goes on. But we anticipate these obscure explanations as they are the fibre of the story and they provide the drama.
His Last Bow is a showcase of Sherlock Holmes from the good, the bad and the ugly. The bad and the ugly, if we are to nitpick, is the inconsistency of the stories, as in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, the story took its twists and turns to be blown out of proportions. What does the initial victim of the story John Eccles serve in the story? As a mere red herring, his name was an afterthought at the end of the story which took a too drastic turn.
We also must believe wholeheartedly in Holmes’ overbearing genius, as shown in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box where for a second time in the Holmes Saga, the detective figured out what Watson was thinking, just by studying his mere body language — Not just what he was thinking at that time, but also what Watson’s train of thought was, including obscure patriotic thoughts. My reaction on reading this passage was an outright PFFFT.
Yet, I read Sherlock Holmes not only for its escapism but also for its contemplations of humanity, which at times can be absurdist, nihilist but at times heart-wrenchingly warm. This is the good. It is what takes the Sherlock Holmes books levels above detective stories then and now. Again, these cases are a display of humanity taken to the extreme. But in The Last Bow we get Holmes’ own opinion on the matter, something that we hardly ever get from the reticent detective, as he solved the issue of the pair of ears in a cardboard box:
“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
In this brief passage, we get to know Holmes as we never knew him before. Though we can surmise that Holmes takes up his cases for the reason of the chase, thus being an artist doing art for art’s sake, there is a deeper search than the game itself: the hunt for meaning, the hunt for the justifications of the existence of evil. And for this, though his genius may make him capable to delve deep into someone’s train of thoughts by observing simple body language, Holmes cannot resolve this puzzle of human nihilism. Yet, I feel that within Holmes is the drive to figure out this ultimate problem so that he can better humanity.
This is Turgenev’s Bazarov, as powerful as his character may be, defeated by the force of nature. Holmes, in the realm of men, can be a master of their minds but he is insignificant compared to the reasons of nature. And I’d like to think after reading the eight Holmes books, that this desire to better humanity is the rationale of his existence, and that he is unable to resolve this perennial question makes him a tragic hero. He continues his work, selecting cases knowing that he most likely won’t be able to answer the question above, yet trying his damnest anyway to iron out the creases in the wrinkles of humanity.
To this final thought, I bid Sherlock Holmes goodbye. I will revisit this old friend through Cumberbatch’s performance maybe in the BBC series and via second reads of Doyle’s books. But to have finished his stories brought me a strange but melancholic relief. It is saying goodbye to an old acquaintance, but a friend who you’d know that in the future, you won’t be able to share new stories with anymore. It hits different.
