Feature2 - FictionalDeath
We’re in for a spate of these books, aren’t we? These are gray-hair volumes, lugubrious tomes that bemoan, sotto voce, the decrepitude of old age under the guise of youth and adventure recollected.
Thus we have Water for Elephants, by Susan Gruen, an excellently constructed plot, peppered with vividly conceived characters and circumstance. The tale nevertheless leaves the reader with ashes in his mouth and listless cobwebs of grief in his hair. Life is tragic because of its inevitable end. The Iliad isn’t worthwhile because Troy falls.
Contrast this with Chabon’s The Final Solution. Or are the differences chimerical? Let’s probe a little.
Water for Elephants was CalgaryMensa’s December book club choice. The protagonist is a veterinary student at Cornell in 1931. He is a week shy of final exams when his parents die in a car accident. Stunned and penniless, he hops a freight and discovers it belongs to a traveling circus. Every day a different town. Thus does he press himself into vigorous external movement while the Brownian motion inside his cranium gathers momentum. We have the usual larger-than-life personages, all nimbly portrayed. The Shakespeare-reading dwarf, the lovely horse rider with heart of gold, the rider’s older ringmaster husband who worships at her feet one moment and cudgels her the next, the circus owner whose implacable brutality (a metaphor for the economic world around them?) keeps the show together, plus a supporting cast of roustabouts, freaks and other performers.
You guessed it. Our shy academic receives quick insight into the real world, and it’s nothing like Cornell. Cue Judy Garland’s line to Toto. You also guessed it. The vet student and lovely horse rider fall in love. Whiz bang, the story is truly set in motion.
Gruen is a master of psychological exegesis or a slave to the genre. Perhaps a bit of both. Everyone receives a driving demon. The ringmaster husband is a paranoid schizophrenic. When he hits his beautiful wife, it isn’t his fault. His wife’s past is also neatly psychoanalyzed. She is 17, of impoverished farming stock. Her parents find a banker willing to marry her. The transaction is presented as a subdued triumph, a guarantee of food, clothing and shelter. But this is a late 20th century novel. Our girl is bored by her prospective husband. Arrives the circus in the nick of time. The dashing ringmaster falls head over heels. The girl opts for the big top over the big house. And when the young vet stumbles into the canvass, the sail is set fair for love. Her parents are well-meant. The girl is respectful. The vet tries to resist. Even the circus owner does his brutal best to keep the enterprise afloat. No one is truly evil. Even the animals are wise and generous. Sigh, once upon a time in America…
No, it’s not as bad as that. In fact quite the opposite. This is a beautifully crafted tale. Gruen does a first class job, and there are plenty of lures to draw the reader forward.
The tale is told in retrospect. The vet, now ninety, has been shelved in an old folks home. But a circus is coming to town and he craves one last opportunity to smell the sawdust and relive his youth. Will his family get him there? Will his body allow him the grace of this final visit?
The home provides perfect caricatures just as did the circus. For example, a rare empathetic nurse is leaving town. Other elderly residents (mainly women) raise the old man’s ire more than excitement. In other words, Gruen’s perceptive pen is a lancet into the body she lays before us.
Life appears a cheat to the old vet. He has such lively memories, yet must inhabit a reluctant body and failing mind, in every respect a tepid patch of ground. The wary reader is forced to speculate. Will the vet meet someone he knows at the circus? In the tale itself, will the young couple’s love find a way? If it does, how will it differ from what the banker had to offer? Do the two scenarios converge? What about the dwarf’s future? The circus itself? Gruen presents a first class job of weaving past and present, subjective and objective. She makes us want to know what happens to characters and how events unfold. And that’s what stories are for. Except…perhaps this surreal child of the romance novel leaves too many feathers unruffled, takes a step too many towards the saccharine land of Disney and this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds.
Chabon then? He twists the genre into an entirely different shape. Chabon’s offering features the elderly Sherlock Holmes, unnamed but with characteristics liberally unfurled: the pipe, hat, cape, manner of thought, relationship with the police. We are in 1941. Holmes is a solitary beekeeper, decrepit but self-sustaining, we aren’t quite sure how. Death may appear at any moment, and Holmes fears the indignity more than the event. Chabon skillfully withholds information as he reveals events that both satirize and enmesh the great detective. Holmes is intrigued by a boy with a parrot. The parrot recites endless streams of numbers in German, and the boy is a refugee from Germany. The government is interested in the parrot, but so is a local tearaway. Obviously we are meant to suspect a code issue and a spoof. Is this the key to Enigma or should the reader be more circumspect? Chabon adroitly steers us away from the whole overdone cluster of spies and conspiracy. We have a murder, yes, but the suspects are an African vicar suffering spiritual agony, German agents who lurk offstage, the local ne’er-do-well and a Soho dealer in exotic birds. But the real issue turns out to be Holmes and old age.
The great detective experiences momentary lapses, described as utter incomprehension of the significance of people and objects, fleeting separations of fact from meaning. This epistemological vertigo takes place rarely. Like mini-seizures, they are righted quickly, but not without the edge of panic. Holmes sees in them the probable future of his mental powers. The moments are the opposite of the penetrating intuitions of his past, his famous deductive insights. We see this proof that the detective is a creature of nature, not reason. Holmes himself never doubted it and faces his future with dread, but heroically.
Chabon grasps three reins firmly in his hand: the detective story is a metaphor for reason’s role in life; we wish with every ounce of strength we can muster that reason would prevail over nature; and the detective parallels the writer creating his plot. Perhaps this is why the detective story is second only to pornography in popularity and why Chabon writes with tongue firmly in cheek. The events are over the top, anchored by the sanity of Holmes’ beekeeping and sensible acceptance of the world. Holmes as our representative patiently awaits death, which hovers just outside the man’s preternatural line of sight. This is the opposite of Gruen’s querulous old narrator, unless you regard the final scene in Water for Elephants as pathetic homage to life as a circus, or as a posy of authorial evasion.
Whatever you decide, you could do much worse than compare these two excellent novels.
(by bb)
