Inspiring Older Readers
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is certainly one that would come into contention if I was being forced to name my ‘Desert Island Books’ selection. I liked The Wonder Boys too and the later Telegraph Avenue and, although not in the same league as Kavalier & Clay, they were good enough to make me buy Chabon’s books whenever I came upon them. I must have picked up The Final Solution some time ago, it’s only a slim volume, and it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since without being read.
I’m always on the lookout for something to read on train journeys and this seemed like the obvious one when I found myself with travelling time to kill. Published in 2004, four years after Kavalier and three years before his next major novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in 2007, it’s quite hard not to see this little book as a bit of a filler.
And, to be honest, that’s pretty much what I think it is. It’s certainly true that it still has all the usual Chabon concerns; Jewish identity, the Holocaust, parenthood and nostalgia; but, for me at least, they not played out in an especially engaging formula and in a way that seems to take a special delight in being obtuse.
Set in 1944, the story takes place in rural England and concerns an 89 year old retired detective who remains unnamed throughout the story but may or may not be Sherlock Holmes. Now more concerned with bee-keeping and contemplating his aching joints, this old man finds himself intrigued by the appearance of a young boy with a parrot on his shoulder. The young boy we discover is called Linus Steinman and he’s a German-Jewish refugee, unable to speak, who is staying with a local vicar and his parrot, named Bruno, is remarkable for its ability to reel off strings of numbers in German.
The murder of a British Foreign Office official and the disappearance of the parrot prompts an harassed police inspector, Michael Bellows, to ask the old man for his help in solving the crime. He agrees that he will try and get the parrot back – but only for the young boy’s sake and refuses to give any guarantees about either solving the crime or uncovering what the numbers might mean.
I’m not giving anything much away in terms of the mystery story element of the book if I say that the old man is only partly successful in his mission.
It seems to me pretty clear that Chabon loads the story with linguistic games and clues to what might be the answer to the puzzle. However, I really felt that this was just being a bit too clever for clever’s sake and that he really hadn’t done enough to make me interested in working so hard to solve these clues. The title of the book itself is clearly the first red flag signalling that there’s more to this than meets the eye – The Final Solution being an obvious reference to Conan Doyle’s Holmes finale, The Final Problem, and to the Nazis more sinister use of the phrase the final solution as applied to their extermination of Jews. We are left at the end to assume that the strings of numbers memorised by the parrot relate in some way to either the numbers allotted to Jews being taken to concentration camps or maybe the numbers of the train wagons shipping them there. But that’s something left wholly to us to conclude from the scraps we’re thrown.
In the end I was disappointed by the book because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being played with by the author and that I was expected to enjoy his rather self-indulgent literary games. I think there might have been a substantial story here if he’d allowed himself to write it as a fully realised novel rather than as a novella full of nods and winks to his own influences and to us as readers.
Part of my disappointment comes from having such high expectations following Kavalier & Clay and it feels like this is the product an author coasting on the tails of his previous success rather than someone inspired to tell me another essential story.
Terry Potter
March 2018