Sunday, April 4, 2010

Schlock Holmes, ha, ha!

Is there an end to postmodern blurring of boundaries of author, narrator, detective, villain?

After retirement, Sherlock Holmes at age 89, moves from London to Sussex, and rooms in a house run by the wife of a Malayali pastor, The Reverend K.T. Panicker of the Church of England. Rev. Kumbhampoika Thomas Panicker is a high-church Anglican vicar who has lost his faith, and is riddled with doubts. He looks to this old lodger for clarity. This at least is how Michael Chabon imagines the great detective in his slender pastiche, The Final Solution. A mysterious mute boy turns up with a remarkable parrot that utters numbers in German, and the detective once again picks up his magnifying glass and the game is afoot, with Rev. Panicker as his Watson.

Many avatars
Concluding the case, the old man ponders over the meaning of detection: ‘ The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings – the discovery of the sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.' The recent movie Sherlock Holmes showed us (once again) that what endears us to Conan Doyle's creation is how Holmes can morph into whomever we want him to be, and wherever we want him to be. Tibet in Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes . Watching a cricket match in Bombay in Vithal Rajan's Holmes of the Raj , as he crosses paths with Tagore, Vivekananda, Ramanujan, Annie Besant, and Jinnah.

Full report here Hindu

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