At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff little line drawings. It is a slim novel with a fat one trying in vain to get in.
In July 1944, the war is nearing its end and Holmes is teetering on the edge of dotage, a prospect that scares him far more than the Reichenbach Falls. Still keeping bees and smoking foul-smelling shag, he is tempted from retirement by a murder outside the vicarage of a nearby village on the South Downs. The vicar, the Revd Mr Panicker, an Indian with High Church tendencies and a sexually deprived wife, takes in lodgers. One of them, an improbable travelling salesman, has been bludgeoned to death, apparently while making a surreptitious departure under cover of darkness.
The household also contains the Panickers’ ne’er-do-well son and two other lodgers. One of the latter is an architectural historian working in a mysterious capacity for a surreal equivalent to Bletchley Park. The other is a German- Jewish boy, a solitary mute who seems capable of forming a relationship only with his African Grey parrot, an intelligent bird given to quoting schoolboy fragments of Schiller and Goethe and to reeling off seemingly random numbers. The parrot has gone missing since the murder.
Holmes does not find his deductive powers unduly stretched. Sweeping aside red herrings, dealing briskly with uncouth detectives and whisky-swilling intelligence officers, he soon succeeds in unmasking the murderer and (rather more importantly) in reuniting boy and parrot. The significance of the numbers is revealed only to the reader, in the course of a chapter narrated from the viewpoint of the kidnapped bird. They hint at a final solution to a three-pipe problem beyond the powers even of Sherlock Holmes.
The novel is a curious blend of Holmesian pastiche and poignant political fable. It is set in a whimsical England where archdeacons are right reverend rather than venerable and where (judging by the illustrations) tulips bloom in July. But there are also glimpses of an infinitely sadder and bleaker world which Holmes- ian reason cannot penetrate, and where German railway waggons rumble through the night to unknown destinations.
Chabon gives the reader a tantalising taste of what he’s capable of. Taken as a whole, however, the book is too sketchy and skimpy to be entirely satisfactory. There’s a wonderful novel here, but it’s still waiting to be finished.
Andrew Taylor is the author of The American Boy (HarperPerennial).
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