Michael Chabon's The Final Solution is a slight but beautifully written book about the final adventure of an old man who is obviously a retired Sherlock Holmes, although he is never so named. One day, he sees a young boy with a parrot on his shoulder standing outside his house. The old man finds out that the boy is a parentless refugee, staying with a kindhearted English family. Then, one day, the boy's parrot goes missing. And Holmes sets out on his final mystery.

Chabon is an incredibly gifted writer, and he invests an inordinate amount of his skill on this trifle of a novel. Take, for instance, this passage on a difficult car, one of my favorite in the book:

In fine weather, and driven by a man as sober as the tenor of his profession demanded, the Panicker vehicle, small, Belgian, ancient, ill-used by the son of its current owner and retaining few of its original constituent parts, was difficult to govern. Its tiny windscreen and broken left headlamp lent it a squinting, groping aspect, like that of a drowning sinner seeking an allegorical lifeline. Its steering mechanism, as was perhaps fitting, relied to a large degree on the steady ap­plication of prayer. Its brakes, though it was blasphemy to say, may have lain beyond the help even of divine interces­sion. On the whole in its unfitness, shabbiness, and supreme air of steady and irremediable poverty it neatly symbolized, in his own personal view, all that was germane to the life of the man who--far from professionally sober and caught up in a gust of inward turbulence nearly as profound as that which on this cold, wet, blustery, thoroughly English sum­mer morning buffeted the sad tan Imperia from one side to the other of the London road--found himself, his foot pumping madly at the hopeless brake pedal, the single wiper smearing and revising its translucent arc of murk across the windscreen, on the brink of committing vehicular manslaughter.

Or take this description of Holmes, coming upon the boy for the first time and realizing that a mystery lies therein: "For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight." (Chabon's novels spark a pressing urge to quote. Please pardon me.)

Chabon perfectly conveys the sense of a small English town far from the outskirts of the great world war that is occurring on the Continent. He also describes, with both great effectiveness and great respect, Sherlock Holmes's decreptidue. It is clear that the wiry detective who could once unbend an iron poker has lost a great deal due to the passage of time. His knees give him problems; his mind fogs up on him; and he is lonely, more than he would care to admit.

For a novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, the actual mystery of the The Final Solution is surprisingly straightforward, even boring at times. But it quickly becomes apparent to the reader--but not to Holmes or any of his English compatriots--that the parrot and the young boy have a significance well beyond the context of this particular mystery. After all, the parrot recites strings of numbers; put that together with the title of the book, and you have all that you need to know to solve the actual mystery. But it all ends up feeling vaguely inconsequential, lacking the emotional oomph or meaning of Chabon's longer works.

I'm not so sure what this book is about. But it is indescribably sad to see the old man--the very epitome of rationality--struggle so valiantly to solve his last case, when the whole world is about to descend into madness. His era, a time when bad men could still be caught by ingenious detection, is about to be replaced by a world where evil men boast of their atrocities and still die peacefully in their own beds. Holmes may have solved the mystery of the missing parrot. But he never comes close to understanding the genocidal mysteries held by the parrot and his silent boy. And that is the surest sign that both his skills and the world that needed them have passed on.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu