Review of The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

I recently decided to reread The Moonstone, a classic of Victorian fiction by Wilkie Collins. One of my online reading groups chose to read it because it is available free as an ebook these days, so it seemed to them like a good “recession buster.” That got me to thinking maybe I’d join them with this particular book (though, much as I love my Kindle, I read my aged, yellowed paperback priced originally $1.45). I could only dimly remember the plot since I last read it as a teenager. T.S. Eliot called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” That seemed like a good recommendation, and I am in the midst of laying out the plot to my own mystery, so studying a master would be good inspiration, and he certainly was.

What fun to reread this book! I’m afraid I neglected my own writing for a day or two. I certainly learned some good tricks. For example, Collins invents multiple ways for critical information to be kept from the necessary characters for unconscionably long tracks of time. No quick resolutions here. Sometimes you need to hold off letting the cat out of the bag, and I got plenty of ideas in that regard. He plants clues masterfully, sometimes letting them hide in plain sight, sometimes carefully drawing attention to them but cloaking their true significance behind layers of false assumptions.

But the greatest enjoyment for me about this venerable book lay in the personality of the narrators. Collins uses the conceit that one of the main characters has requested reports from each of the key witnesses to the various stages of the remarkable episode of the Moonstone, an exotic diamond originally stolen from India. In this way, Collins creates interest in his long book by changing who tells us the action, but it’s more than variety that intrigues. Each narrator is built into a richly developed character. Their ways of understanding the people and events contribute to the engaging quality of the novel. After a brief Prologue “extracted from a family paper” that gives the Indian background, we hear from Gabriel Betteredge, the aged and delightful house-steward of the grand country home where the main strand of the mystery begins. He’s impossible not to like, even while we chuckle at his set notions. Did you know Robinson Crusoe is an eternal fount of wisdom for all of life’s difficulties, a true prophetic document? We’ll hear from the spinster aunt Miss Clack, Mr. Bruff, a clever and worldly solicitor, Franklin Blake, the romantic hero of the book, Ezra Jennings, an outcast physician with Gypsy bloodlines, and Sergeant Cuff, an early example of the brilliant and eccentric detective (but there’s a twist with his brilliant conclusions). Collins has fun with his story-tellers. Their blindnesses, prejudices, and humanity are all on display. We are invited to assume a superior stance to their limitations, but that, of course, is only part of the ploy. Dear reader, you will discover your own limitations as you read! But you’ll also laugh at the foibles and idiosyncrasies of each narrator in turn. This is a winding, complex tale with a heart and a conscious.

Collins is remarkably forward thinking for a Victorian. The do-gooder Miss Clack, who is always out to save another Christian soul, is portrayed as remarkably small-minded. Her version of religion, a parody of what we sometimes imagine of the Victorian era, does not shine as a beacon of love and charity. Nor do those characters who immediately suspect evil of all dark skinned “Orientals.” Nonetheless, Collins’s portrayal of India is decidedly un-PC, as much as his view is enlightened for his day. You’ll have to accept the historical moment from which he wrote. I found it interesting in light of our current East-West dichotomy that so often underlies the way we approach issues without our being fully conscious of it. The Victorians were, after all, only carrying on a tradition of bigotry against the East started by the Athenians in the 5th Century B.C.E. History has its uses on the road to enlightenment.

And, it turns out, Victorian mysteries have their pleasures. Sometimes the best things in life are indeed free. (That is if you have an e-reader or you kept your high school paperbacks.)