Pulitzer-winner tries British mystery - Book Reviews

Michael Chabon

The Final Solution

Harper Collins/Fourth Estate

132 pages

November, 2004

by Ellis Singer

After his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with its cultural buffet of Jewish thematic material, and his marriage to Jewish novelist Ayelet Waldman, it seemed that Michael Chabon was becoming increasingly fascinated with his adopted religion. With that in mind, when he published a mystery novel called The Final Solution, it looked like he had become completely obsessed with his Jewish identity 84 or at least with the Holocaust, and with the effect it was having on his conscience.

But The Final Solution, beyond its ominous title, has very little to do with Holocaust testimonial, politics, or memory. It is much more a study in mysterycraft 84 a brilliant writer's dive into the world of Poirrot and Holmes, complete with a British setting and a reclusive old man as the lead detective.

The novel begins with a mute young German boy, presumably a Jewish refugee of the Third Reich, arriving in London with nothing but a parrot. This parrot, it turns out, is the keeper of a long string of numbers arranged in a sequence that may be a code related to the war. What exactly it may be is never elucidated, but it is clear that many people would go to great lengths 84 including murder 84 to get it. The mystery is not in the meaning of the numbers, but in the identity of the murderer of Mr. Shane, one of the lodgers at Mrs. Panicker's boarding house, where the young mute boy ends up staying. Mr. Shane was murdered while trying to make off with the bird.

In terms of wordcraft alone, Chabon hits his target squarely. The Final Solution is written in a type of crisp, wryly detached British drawl that makes each sentence a filling eyeful (or mouthful, if read aloud). For example, when Chabon describes the old man, who is a beekeeper, the reader gets this morsel:

The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The featureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable, and distinct as the separate stones of a featureless gray shingle, and he moved along the sound, tending to his hives like a beachcomber, stooped and marveling. It mean nothing, of course 84 he wasn't as batty as all that 84 but this did not imply, not at all, that the song had no meaning.

The fault of the book lies in the depths of both plot and character. A mystery, particularly one after the tradition of Poe or Conan Doyle, must make deduction seem like a thrill-ride, calculation like a carnival. The recreation of a murder must put the reader in the place of the victim 84 or the killer, as the case may be 84 and give life to the crime. Perhaps it is because Chabon makes as if to tackle both deductive problems in this story (the meaning of the code and the identity of the killer) at the same time, but does neither (in the end, the killer is a character that is so undeveloped, that it almost doesn't make a difference) that the book does not succeed completely in tickling the fancy for conspiracy and plot.