Death by Doyle
I am currently drowning in a sea of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-related stories, both film and written word.
A few months ago my marvelous Tivo started recording a show on PBS each weekend. It was “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke as Watson. The series began in the mid-1980′s, and was pretty well done for the small budget it must have had at the time.
Jeremy Brett is an insanely energetic and curiously appealing Holmes, really bringing the detective’s most Asperger’s-like traits to life. You don’t like him, you admire him, you adore him, you find him irritating, you can’t look away.
His thin, pale Holmes is so focused and yet so inter-personally flawed, so intelligent and cold, it’s wonderful to watch. His snobby, dismissive hand gestures and sneering attitude toward everything he encounters had me transfixed. (My own particular weakness fondness for emotionally-unavailable geniuses notwithstanding.) His self-pitied moaning about the ennui of his existence, which he needs both cocaine and morphine to enliven, aroused my empathy.
I found myself remembering the stories (sans cocaine/morphine somehow) from reading them when I was younger (the one with the asp who climbs down the rope and returns at the sound of whistle being a horrifying favorite) and being fascinated all over again.
And so I kept watching . It was always a lazy weekend treat to drowse in front of the TV listening to Holmes castigate poor Watson for his shortsighted dunderheadedness.
David Burke played an adorable Watson, too. He was so happy! So willing to be pleased and impressed by everything! He was never angry or sullen or jealous, only willing to help and ready to play Holme’s foil. Charming.
The series ends with Holmes death at Reichenbach Falls, and then picks up in 1986 with his resurrection for “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” This time a new actor (Edward Hardwicke) plays Watson, and I was prepared not to like him so much, because he didn’t seem as happy—but after a few episodes he seems to have picked up that naive joy so characteristic to perennial second-fiddle Watson.
I didn’t think about the series much, just enjoyed it when Tivo picked it up.
Then after Christmas I was in Borders and ran across this book “Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes. I’d read Barnes’ “England, England” many a year ago, and remembered liking it, and it was $4.99 hardback, so what the heck. I had trouble getting into it, the first quarter of the book explains in great disconnected detail the lives of two young boys— lives which have no common thread running between them—which made me wonder why I was supposed to care about either of them. The “Arthur” in the title is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Holmes series, and “George” was some son of a vicar no one ever heard of.
After a while it became more interesting, and in the end I was quite fascinated with the story. (No spoilers, but it’s a true-life tale of Doyle getting involved with a case of criminal injustice, which directly impacted the creation of the British Courts of Appeal. Let me know if you want to borrow it, it’s quite good.) When I was done I read the afterword. (Which, had it been the foreword would have made me much more interested in the book from the beginning) It said that all correspondence and newspaper articles quoted in the text were taken verbatim from the original stories/documents. Anyway, it was a great peek inside the mind of Doyle, and made me even more resolved to go get the collected Sherlock Holmes to re-read.
Books acquired Saturday (Dear Publisher: “Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Collected Stories and Novels, Volume 1″— with the “Volume 1″ in teeeeeny-tiny type on the spine— is a ridiculous title. How each book “complete” if it’s one of a two-volume set? Luckily I noticed that the second copy of the book was smaller than the first and picked them both up, or I would have been mightily pissed when I got home.) And I’ve been happily devouring them ever since. Several things struck me:
- How language evolves. “But Holmes! You can’t be serious!” I ejaculated. Seriously, Watson ejaculates at some point in almost every story.
- How authors of that time period didn’t dumb-down their texts for their audiences. Liberal usage of $5 words and frequent un-translated German and French quotations show me that Sir Doyle expected a certain level of education from his audience, and that if they didn’t have it, they should reach up to his level of understanding, not expect him to shove his writing down to theirs.
I am now all caught up in this world of Victorian manners and language, which I think suited my personality much better than the era I was mistakenly born in. (Though I do quite approve of all the sanitation and antibiotics we have, don’t get me wrong.) Still only 1/3 of the way through Volume I and a whole Volume II to go after that. In addition, for the last week I’ve taken to reading at night instead of watching TV, and it’s really very cuddly up in here, with the dogs laying all over me and candles burning. It makes the long, stupid winter nights somehow less of a complete waste of time.
Two other notes. Jeremy Brett played Mr. Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the Audrey Hepburn film of My Fair Lady. And though I know a lot of popular TV & film characters would later be based on Holmes, the one who currently most reminds me of him in all his mannerisms is Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory.”
Anyway, check out the PBS series if you have time, it’s quite charming.
Filed under: Reading/Book Reviews, things that don't suck | Comments (5)5 Responses to “Death by Doyle”
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In Victorian times if you said, “The fellow is quite mad.” then you’d mean, “The fellow is as mad as a box of frogs – a complete mentalist.” So “quite” meant “very”.
Nowadays “quite” means “slightly” as in, “She is quite pretty, but not stunning”
No idea why that word changed.
Oh, and it’s not a good idea for straight guys to go out on say, your birthday feeling very happy and telling people by announcing that you are “feeling quite gay today” – now there is a word that has really changed it’s meaning.
Another word that you can’t use in the same way anymore is “positive.” For instance on a dating site, you don’t want to describe yourself as “Sexually adventurous, fun-loving, positive.”