strange and random happenstance: Madresfield

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle
Published by: Book-of-the-Month Club
Publication Date: 1915
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Holmes has a snitch in Moriarty's organization. This snitch warns him of the impending murder of one John Douglas. Just as Holmes finishes perusing the note the police arrive to ask for his help in the murder of one John Douglas of Birlstone Manor in Sussex. Holmes's snitch lost his nerve and sent the note too late. Of course this only whets Holmes's appetite for the crime, because it obviously has some connection to Moriarty. The case is a perplexing one. Birlstone Manor is a moated property, with the drawbridge raised every night. John Douglas was shot at point blank range with a double barrelled shotgun blast to the face, yet only his house guest, Cecil Barker, heard the shot and was at the scene of the crime in minutes. Yet he didn't see the shooter. The only way the killer could have escaped is out the window and across the moat, which could be waded. Yet there are too many inconsistencies with the story and two things bother Holmes. One is that the victim's wedding ring was removed, though it was always beneath a second ring, which was still present. But more importantly, there is an exercise weight in the room. Only a single one. Where is it's mate? As Holmes pieces together what happened at Birlstone Manor he realizes that it is only the dead man or his killer who can tell the whole story, going back years ago to America, long before Cecil Barker met John Douglas, to the time before John's first marriage, to the deadly Scowrers.

The Valley of Fear is an odd edition to the canon of Sherlock Holmes. Once again Arthur Conan Doyle bowed to the pressure of his reading public and brought back his famous consulting detective, but in the most halfhearted way possible. The entire book feels as if it's balanced on a knife's edge between the extremes of not caring and finding some way to make it about anything other than Holmes. The most obvious aspect of Conan Doyle's laziness is that the structure of the book harks directly back to A Study in Scarlet. First half Holmes, second half America, back to Watson for the epilogue. This structure didn't really work the first time yet here we are in the same situation again. Yet this recurrence could have been forgiven had the initial mystery held, oh, I don't know, some mystery. What is in essence a locked room mystery, the cornerstone of compelling whodunits, is anything but captivating. In fact I was far more interested in the architectural design of the house where the murder occurred which was reminiscent of Madresfield Court, which is the ancestral seat of the Lygon family, than the crime which I solved ludicrously fast. You might say, oh, she's over-exaggerating her own crime solving prowess and the murder really was worthy of Holmes. No, I'm not, and no, it was not, hence my being able to solve it with such rapidity. The second the corpse was revealed with his face blown off and a missing wedding ring, I knew that the corpse laying on the floor wasn't the intended victim. It was all stage dressing, and clumsily done at that.

Which brings me back to the fact that this wasn't a crime worthy of Holmes. And the truth is, I think Conan Doyle did this on purpose. He no longer wanted to write about Holmes, so he couldn't be bothered. In fact with the second half of the book being set in America and not concerning Holmes he is quite obviously taking a step back from his famous detective. Holmes isn't really necessary for this story to work, he's more a deus ex machina, coming in and explaining what happened to wrap everything up. The Valley of Fear is written in such a way that it's a Sherlock Holmes book without really being a Sherlock Holmes book. All the writing prowess of Conan Doyle was exerted in the second part of the book with the Scowrers. Here he cared about writing a compelling narrative about evil men and secret societies. This is where Conan Doyle wanted to focus his energies, and so he did. He created a rather compelling second act, and I'm sure, if it was up to him, that would have been all he wrote. But he halfheartedly put together this framing device with Holmes so that the book is "technically" a Sherlock Holmes book. It makes me wonder what his reading public thought of it when it was published in 1915. Did they feel cheated? Was it a bait and switch? Or were they OK with the book because it had been ten long years since they'd had any new stories and therefore they took what they could get?

Or was the public appeased because of the Moriarty factor? Because incongruously, there is a strong Moriarty factor. I say incongruously because when this Napoleon of crime was introduced in "The Final Problem" he had never been heard of before. In fact Watson makes a big to-do about not knowing anything about Holmes's so-called arch-nemesis. Yet here Conan Doyle is going against his own set canon having Moriarty wandering about prior to "The Final Problem" with Watson and the police all in the "know." It feels like there's too much back-peddling and re-writing in The Valley of Fear for my taste. Conan Doyle didn't know that Moriarty would seize the imagination of his readers so strongly, therefore he was underused at the time, just a device to rid himself of Holmes. Yet seize their imaginations he did and Conan Doyle brought him back in the only way he could. So whereas his love of writing Holmes might have waned, he still was intrigued by this master criminal and was therefore willing to bring him back as a way to enliven Holmes's narrative. It was also probably a way to remind his readers that at any time Holmes might stop exhibiting his deity-like powers and be resurrected no more. So, perhaps it was more a threat than anything else? But the problem of Moriarty, coupled with the book's structure, is the whole story feels like it's in some way-back machine where it was picking and choosing what had previously worked and creating some semblance of a Holmes story while really wanting to be anything but.

What surprised me about The Valley of Fear was that unlike A Study in Scarlet, the American half of the book actually felt fresh and compelling. Unlike the bizarre fever dream of Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle creates a gritty world reminiscent of Deadwood and Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. This actually feels like a probable America, most likely because it was loosely based on real events. Reading it I was surprised by how relevant and modern it felt. When you think about Sherlock Holmes it is always as that outre detective working within a staid Victorian society. There is that nostalgia factor. Yet as Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss so rightly did when they revitalized the stories for Sherlock they focused on the fact that the stories weren't meant to be caught in these Victorian trappings. The stories were contemporary, of their time, and fresh. Why else were they so popular? Reading them a hundred years later it is almost impossible not to be caught up in the Victoriana, in the minutiae. But then you read The Valley of Fear and it smacks you in the face. It's so alive, so dark, so gritty, so full of corruption and bleakness that you get it. All of a sudden you get that Conan Doyle, while somehow caught in the amber of the past, really isn't of the past, he's creating studies of human nature that are just as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago!

Yet for all that is right, he still has some American issues. Much like we, as readers, have stereotyped him as the writer of the preeminent Victorian consulting detective, he has stereotyped us Americans. And once again the misconceptions and errors run rampant. Firstly, seeing as every American woman is trapped in a doomed love triangle where one of the suitors kills the other, usually after years, where is my doomed love triangle? I have spent my entire life to date without a doomed love triangle and according to Conan Doyle that means I'm not a real American woman. Also, where the hell does this story take place? For a quarter of the book I was sure it was somewhere out west, but slowly I had inklings that it might be Pennsylvania, and since when is Detroit considered the far north? Because Madison is more north than Detroit... so what does that make where I live? Probably Canada according of Conan Doyle... And while I really liked the inclusion of the Pinkertons, and oh, the irony of them being founded by a Masonic Order only to bring one down, I do laugh, I have Pinkerton issues. Mainly my Pinkerton issues are that by this time Pinkertons weren't all good guys. In fact, not to put to fine a point on it, they were kind of evil with their tactics and strikebreaking. So while they do employ underhanded techniques, their ambiguous moral code isn't even touched upon, making them kind of look like heroes, when they are anything but. But then again, Conan Doyle isn't really one for the whole "accuracy" angle, especially as regards anything American.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: A Study in Scarlet, America, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Deadwood, Madresfield, Masonic, Moriarty, Pinkertons, Red Harvest, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, The Final Problem, The Valley of Fear, Victorian

Mad World by Paula Byrne
Published by: Harper
Publication Date: 2009
Format: Paperback, 384 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

"Does anyone else have the Tears for Fears song stuck in her head?

Whether or not the Lygons and their home, Madresfield Court, truly served as Waugh’s model for Brideshead Revisited, this book is a lucid and highly entertaining window into the same small segment of society I needed to understand in order to write The Other Daughter.

Since novelists are inveterate borrowers, it seemed only right to borrow elements of Madresfield (“Madders”) for Rachel’s father’s estate, Carrisford (“Caffers”). Any similarities are more than coincidental." - Lauren Willig

Evelyn Waugh was one of the writers who immortalized the 20s generation of "Bright Young People" through his books. But his book, Brideshead Revisited, more then any of his other work, was a touchstone for a generation and one of the greatest books of the 20th century. Yet the story didn't emerge fully formed from his conscious, it was inspired by his relationship with the Lygon family. They lived in a great old pile, Madresfield, where the three sons and four daughters grew up in bucolic bliss till their family was rocked by scandal. The Lygon patriarch, Lord Beauchamp, was exiled from England upon divorce proceedings initiated by his wife for his homosexual tendencies. The children blamed their mother for this rend in the family and started to live a life devoid of parental control. Into this world Evelyn Waugh appeared. Bringing his signature wit and style he befriended the family and came to fall in love with them all, rumors had it that back at Oxford he was more then a little in love with the second son, Hugh. Hugh would become the basis for Sebastian Flyte, and the entire Lygon family and their life was to be immortalized in Waugh's magnum opus. But did they have any say in the matter?

If you want to keep your well held belief that Evelyn Waugh is a genius and Brideshead Revisited is one of the most original masterpieces of the last century, I urge you not to read this book. If, on the other hand, you always suspected that Waugh wasn't that nice or that Brideshead Revisited was a boring plotless book, well, you probably won't read Mad World, but know that your opinion is validated a thousand fold. While I always suspected that Evelyn Waugh wasn't that nice, never did I think that he would so carelessly use his friends and family as fodder for his books. Yes, I did know that he satirized those around him, much as Nancy Mitford did, but this book brought it home as something more. Waugh was a user. He lived an itinerant life travelling from one friend's home to another and then using what he saw there to create his books. He lambasted friends who couldn't use the world around them as fodder for their books and needed to do research, yet he used the lives him around in a cruel and flippant ways in his work. He was a leech, and not a very likable one. The thing that mystifies me is that Byrne claims that Waugh's friends didn't blame him for capitalizing on their pain, that mockery was part and parcel or being Waugh's friend and that he was easy to forgive. Yet Byrne says this, she doesn't show this. How am I to believe this? Because it sounds like Waugh hurt a lot of people to get to where he got in the literary world and that the wounds struck his friends deep but they just put on a brave face for him.

Mad World boils down all Waugh's books, his entire literary cannon, to thinly disguised roman à clefs. Byrne, while obviously a fan of Waugh, did a disservice to him in writing this book because it takes away the magic of that lost generation captured in Brideshead Revisited. Why is the magic gone? Because Waugh just used the Lygon family and transferred their lives into another medium. While the book still captures this lost generation of halcyon Oxford days, it narrows down the universality of the book. It makes it one family's history, not an archetypal history. It also shows that Waugh, while able to spin a wonderful phrase, didn't have an original bone in his body. He was more historian than writer. All his books, not just Brideshead Revisited, are rooted in reality, almost painfully so. Each character has a real life counterpart, each adventure is centered on a story in his life. While writers do take inspiration from the world around them, it feels like Waugh was a hack. He could ONLY write the world around him transmuted into a book. And while Brideshead Revisited was a loving portrayal of the Lygons, unlike some of his vicious parodies hidden in such characters as Anthony Blanche, did Waugh's friendship with them give him carte blanche to write this story? No it didn't. He used them and moved on.

But what disturbed me most about this book was that while the book was cleverly supposed to be a dual history of Waugh and the Lygons, which is why I was interested in this book, it became more and more a single-sided story where we were just given Waugh's POV. We read his copious letters to the Lygon sisters, and how they were transmuted into the Flytes, down to even phrases excised from Waugh's letters to them and then used in the book, but we never hear their voices. We never get a feeling as to who these sisters were. Was their relationship reciprocal? Did they actually write to Evelyn as much as he wrote to them? Why don't we have any of their letters? Was Waugh perhaps a venal man who carried on single-sided correspondence with the great and the good making more out of a friendship then it really was? I'd say this is quite possible and without any evidence or letters to the contrary, this is the only conclusion I can reach. The Lygon sisters where barely more than props to Evelyn who used his connection to them to puff up his ego and used his experiences with them to make a name for himself with his writing. And while Byrne states that after the sisters left Madresfield forever Waugh kept up a correspondence with them that lasted the rest of his life, but that isn't what it looks like. It looks like he wrote Brideshead Revisited, made a true masterpiece and dropped them. He'd occasionally look in but he had no use for them and his old itinerant lifestyle so, much like the props they appear to be, they were placed in storage only to be occasionally let out into the light.

The subject matter and how it's handled wasn't the biggest downfall of the book. The biggest downfall was the haphazard way that Byrne decided to keep some facts and omit others. By redacting parts of Evelyn's life, how can I actually believe anything this authors says in her stilted and amateurish writing style? She skips over things that I think are rather important, like Evelyn working as a gossip columnist. Not only did this feed into his writing style but it was a common experience with his friends and contemporaries. Why omit this? Because if it was to show him as a superior writer, well, everything about this book portrays him as a hack, so why not a hack journalist? Then Byrne's lack of adherence to naming conventions drove me batty. In a time when everyone had three nicknames, just choose one please? I seriously don't know which is which Lygon sister due to Byrne randomly choosing a different nickname or occasionally their real name. Just stop. But worst of all was the repetitive nature of the book, the reliance on only a handful of quotes used over and over again. Did Byrne have any editor at all? My guess is no as in the way she's string quotes from different sources with clunky "and this" "and then" "and now." This kind of sloppy writing was beaten out of me in high school and here is a published author trying to write a discourse on Brideshead Revisited that wouldn't pass muster with the most generous of teachers.

As for the most disgusting aspect of this book? The general acceptance of pederast culture. Wherein any pretty young man was viewed as fair game, even if they were underage. Teacher's quite literally using their students, in particular a nasty story about one of Evelyn's friends having a student sodomize him with his foot, and Lord Beauchamp using every able bodied and attractive male as a possible sexual conquest. I'm not saying this shouldn't be addressed or omitted. This happened and a discourse needs to be had. What I am saying is that it shouldn't be treated with such a laissez-faire attitude. Using a position of power for sex is something that should NEVER be acceptable. Yes it happens, but it's this acceptance by people like Byrne that allow it to continue. That this happened should incite a revolt! It shouldn't be a joke in one of Waugh's letters. Some talk about the culture of the time would have been considerate. But making a point that this is unacceptable needed to be said, and Byrne didn't. She even seemed to find it all a little piquant, especially when discussing Beauchamp and his servants. It's not piquant, it's repulsive.