Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Some critics take this idea even further to suggest that the novel echoes the notion that the mode of Enlightenment rationality epitomized by Sherlock Holmes, taken to its extreme and combined with modernist impulses, has led to the totalitarian fascist regime of Nazi Germany during World War II. As Craps and Buelens put it:

  The Final Solution undermines popular, reassuring interpretations of the Holocaust as an irrational hate crime, a reversion to barbarism that can be safely consigned to the German context. It suggests that, rather than being a bizarre or aberrant episode in modern history, the Holocaust is an integral part of that history, as genocide lies at the heart of Western modernity. (580)

  Craps and Buelens go on to argue that the novel suggests that there is less difference than is traditionally assumed between Nazi Germany and British (and, increasingly, American) imperialism and I will explore that idea a bit later in the chapter. In terms of narrative structure, The Final Solution offers its multiple points of view as an innovation in—perhaps even a corrective for—the celebration of the focus on the singular perspective of the man of genius and rationality deductively putting clues together to restore proper order to the world.

  Indeed, the novel goes even further as it challenges the effectiveness of that very genius, as is demonstrated during the old man’s investigation of the crime scene. The old man determines that Shane, the murdered government agent, was attempting to steal the parrot when he was accosted from behind, and the murderer disappeared with the parrot in its cage. The vicar’s son Reggie has been arrested for the crime because a card for an exotic bird dealer was found on his person: Reggie, the police believe, wanted to sell the bird to pay off gambling debts. The old man is skeptical of this hypothesis and wonders as well why Shane would have wanted to steal the parrot in the first place. During his investigation of the scene, the old man is suddenly overcome by a sort of anxiety attack that has been affecting him with increasing frequency, in which he feels viscerally “the conquest of his mind by age”: “He felt—with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia—the inevitability of his failure” (35).[6] “Failure” here evokes multiple possible meanings: the failure to solve this particular case; the eventual failure of the health and intellect of an aging man; or even the failure—in the face of the horrors of the incipient Holocaust—of the old man’s much vaunted brand of reasoned deduction and the ability of rationality in general to provide neat and concrete answers to life’s mysteries. So, while the old man still has the potential to be delighted by a new and seemingly incongruous question, moments such as these hint at questions that he might not even be able to confront, much less answer.

  Furthermore, the intellectual weakness and metaphysical doubt evinced by the old man represent a clear disassociation from the traditional Conan Doyle mystery stories, in which the sound judgment and rectitude of Sherlock Holmes, while sometimes questioned by those around him, is never doubted by the great man himself, nor by the reader. The old man’s shaken faith in his own abilities, his recognition that his failure is not just possible but inevitable, is indicative of a world quite different from the “essentially static” one in which there is a “guarantee of continuity and permanence” usually depicted by mystery stories (Malmgren 119). As Anna Richardson argues: “Chabon’s departure from the conventions of the genre further problematizes the relationship between mystery fiction and Holocaust narrative, implying as it does that one cannot impose a resolution upon such a culturally complex event” (164). Once again, The Final Solution plumbs the limits of detached, disinterested rationality.

  But the old man is not as disinterested as he used to be, nor is he as patriotic. While investigating why milk-machine salesman Shane would have been interested in a German-speaking parrot, the old man discovers that the neighborhood “dairy” is actually some sort of clandestine code-cracking institute resembling Bletchley Park.[7] Slowly but inexorably, the old man realizes that British agents, having heard about the parrot, suspect that the numbers it recites could be related to codes for the German Kriegsmarine. As the old man eventually learns, during the first years of the war, Linus’s family lived in hiding with a high-level Nazi naval officer who was a psychiatric patient of Linus’s father. Apparently, Shane had wanted to investigate the parrot to determine whether his strings of numbers had any security significance—an unlikely scenario, to be sure, but as Shane was subsequently murdered and the parrot mysteriously taken, the suspicion persists that the bird might somehow contain strategic information. Colonel Threadneedle, a representative of the British military, explains it to the old man this way: “If they had a parrot stuffed to the wingtips with our naval cipher, we would certainly make every effort to get it back. . . . Or see it roasted on a spit” (70).

  This bit of military intrigue recalls Conan Doyle’s very last Sherlock Holmes story, the 1917 “His Last Bow” in which Holmes acts as a double agent, pretending to pass vital information to the Germans on the brink of the Great War, but in reality serving the British Empire, collecting German information and providing faulty intelligence to the Germans. As depicted in that story, the Germans are bent on starting the war and have even predetermined August 1914 as the time in which to do so. Holmes views his foray into espionage and the impending war as a sort of game, gleefully telling his deceived German partner, “Mr. Von Bork: you are a sportsman . . . you have done your best for your country, and I have done my best for mine, and what could be more natural?” (1441). At the end of “His Last Bow,” Holmes tells Watson that this bit of spy work will be his last; he will retire now to his estate and his bees. The story concludes as Holmes and Watson contemplate the seemingly unavoidable war and Holmes says: “There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared” (1443). This story, and this oft-quoted passage in particular, are now frequently considered World War I propaganda, as they depict Holmes as the defender of empire and proponent of war. This story was published three years into that devastating conflict yet still depicts it as a necessary and cleansing event; in this sense, “His Last Bow” stands not only as the final Sherlock Holmes story, but a last-gasp depiction of a dying worldview that celebrated the intellectual and nationalistic values Sherlock Holmes represented.

  The Final Solution embodies a change in those values. In it, the old man refers to his stint as a British agent as he says to Colonel Threadneedle, “I hope that I was of some little service, here and there, over the years” (67). But it becomes clear that the old man no longer wishes to serve his government in the same way; his sympathies, if not his loyalties, have shifted elsewhere. Threadneedle misunderstands the old man’s interest in the case, saying that, should the old man be able to find the strategically interesting parrot, Threadneedle himself would bestow upon him the “thanks of a grateful nation and so forth.” To Threadneedle’s surprise, the old man responds rather vehemently: “I shall return him to the boy” (71). When given the choice between a lonely orphaned refugee and the “thanks of a grateful nation,” the old man does not hesitate to make a very different choice than the younger, prewar Holmes. No longer is the old man an unapologetic British jingoist, and no longer is he involved in the case purely for its uniqueness: rather, he wants to return to Linus his only friend.

  Furthermore, the old man no longer resembles Malmgren’s definition of the ideal investigator, who “must be a detached ‘amateur’ so that he or she can approach the narrative’s signs in a disinterested fashion” because he knows that “an interest in the case would interfere with or skew the process of detection” (Malmgren 120). Instead, the old man is deeply and, to his own surprise, personally involved in the case, feeling “a strong desire, nearly an ache, to see the reflection of happiness in the boy’s face” (Final Solution 127). Indeed, the old man’s pe
rsonal stake in the outcome of the case becomes another expression of the impending failure of his brand of purely objective rationality.

  This alteration in the old man’s relationship to his country is a major departure from the traditional Sherlock Holmes story. As Cawelti has pointed out: “Conan Doyle’s attitudes were deeply Victorian, and he strongly affirmed most of the values of traditional British culture in his stories by making Holmes and Watson embody the combination of solidity, morality, and eccentricity so central to the ideal of the British gentry while often having his criminals represent groups who threatened this traditional order” (“Canonization” 6). Yet here, when the parrot thief is potentially a Nazi—an agent of the country at war with his own—the old man remains unmoved, determined to return the parrot to the boy. In this postmodern mystery, the old sureties are called into doubt, from the unalloyed rightness of Britain to the unerring effectiveness of the old man’s brain and the enlightened reason it represents.

  Furthermore, this choice of child over country—and a German child no less—can be seen as an indication that The Final Solution means to indict not only the Nazi regime but empire more generally, suggesting a more complex stance toward the Holocaust than merely vilifying the Germans and canonizing the Allied forces. The Final Solution, Craps and Buelens argue, suggests “continuities and parallels between the Third Reich and the European colonial empires and between the plights of their respective victims” (569). For example, the British minister Threadneedle, it is suggested, is clearly capable of brutality, wanting to roast the parrot on a spit and idly, almost dreamily remarking on his way out of the old man’s house: “What’s the taste of parrot meat, I wonder?” (71). This remark leaves a less-than-sympathetic impression of the representative of the British Empire and its military to which the old man no longer offers unstinting loyalty.

  I would take Craps and Buelens’s argument a step further to argue that it is not just the European colonial empires that are being connected to the Third Reich and, subsequently, indicted in this novel. As the old man heads into London to search for clues—his first visit in twenty-three years—he braces himself for the sight he expects to see of a city bombed into smoking ruins. And indeed, he does see demolished buildings, but, despite the Blitz, London is also replete with “strange new life,” characterized by a “startling Americanness.” An almost overwhelming American military presence permeates the city, “as if the invasion of Europe itself, now proceeding in bloody stages across northern France, were only the inevitable exploding forth of a buildup of jazzy slang and the uncontainable urge to buck and wing” (100). The novel depicts the nascent rise of postwar American influence, connecting it unmistakably to this European conflict, even suggesting that the conflict itself is merely a symptom of the inevitable “exploding forth” of American power. By 1944, the year this novel takes place, it is fairly clear that the Nazi regime will be defeated, but the American infiltration of London suggests that hegemonic empire—in all its unsavory and brutal glory—continues regardless, simply passed on to another national power.

  This sense that the novel posits an interconnectivity between different nationalities and their empires is evinced in the mystery of the German numbers: the central mystery of the novel that remains unsolved by the old man and is only revealed to the reader by an unlikely source: the parrot himself. For, as I said earlier, almost every character in The Final Solution is afforded his or her turn in providing his or her perspective, and this includes Bruno the parrot, whose point of view is featured near the end of the novel after he has been stolen by Kalb, Linus’s representative from the Aid Committee that helped him emigrate. Like so many others, Kalb became intrigued by Bruno’s German numbers, but, rather than believing them to be of wartime significance, suspected that they referred to a Swiss bank account. He murdered Shane, who had been in the process of stealing Bruno, and then disappeared with the parrot himself. Kalb has holed up with Bruno, desperately writing down the strings of numbers as Bruno sings them. We learn from Bruno that he refers to the numbers as “the train song, the song of the long rolling cars” that Linus “sang in secret, to Bruno alone” in his family’s hidden apartment in Germany (113). The numbers, then, indicate the train cars rolling away with their human cargo headed for imprisonment and slaughter; the song is nothing more—or less—than a child’s game attached to a sight all the more horrible for being commonplace. The connection between the Nazi prisoner trains and “empire” writ large is made in the novel’s last scene. Here, once the parrot has been returned to him, Linus watches at the English train station as a military transport rolls by, “its cars painted a dull gray-green, carrying shells and hams and coffins to stock the busy depots of the European war.” Quietly, so that no one but Bruno can hear, the heretofore mute boy sings along with the train cars: “Sieben zwei eins vier drei” (131), thus implicitly linking the Nazi transport and the British military cargo train.

  Tellingly, no one—not even the old man—has been able to figure out what these numbers mean. Shane, Parkins, Kalb, Panicker: each of these has taken a turn at playing detective and none has been able to determine the numbers’ significance. Here, then, the formulaic elements of the mystery story threaten to break down, as there seem to be some questions that even the old man cannot answer, questions related to human mysteries deeper and more disturbing than any the old man has yet encountered, questions that defy explanation via rational deductive processes. At first glance, this state of affairs could be read as a challenge to efficacy of the mystery form in general. For, as Carl Malmgren has stated, “Mystery presupposes an essentially static world, in which neither social order nor human nature is subject to radical change. Indeed, this guarantee of continuity and permanence is one of the real consolations of the form” (119). There is little sense of continuity, permanence, or consolation provided in The Final Solution; in addition to the ravage of the war, the old man’s faculties are waning, Reggie Panicker has run away in shame, and Linus has lost his family. Since the world depicted in The Final Solution (or our contemporary one) is anything but static, one might suggest that this world is no longer amenable to the traditional mystery form, and that form can no longer provide its traditional consolation. However, although there are clearly some situations that mystery stories cannot put right, I would argue that The Final Solution suggests that some smaller redemption can yet be provided by the mystery novel—some consolation may still be possible.

  On his way to London to look for the parrot, the old man finds that the trains have been commandeered for troop movements, so he hitches a ride to town with Mr. Panicker, who is desperate for a break from his usual stifling role as vicar of a backwater town, disappointing husband to a lonely, disappointed woman, and father of a possible murderer. When Mr. Panicker expresses surprise that the old man is still looking for the parrot, the old man responds, “Aren’t you?” implying that, as the Panickers are acting as Linus’s guardians, they should be just as concerned with the disappearance of his beloved pet (96). This admonition somewhat shocks Panicker out of his self-absorbed haze, causing him to realize that if he is meant to be a parental figure for Linus, he has not been filling that bill: “Now for the first time . . . he spared a thought—a small, frail, sober-eyed, wordless, Linus Steinman–sized thought—for the boy who had lost his only friend” (97). Suddenly, this sad, lonely, and disappointed man recognizes the much deeper pain of the lonely German refugee. The loss of Linus’s parrot causes a similar epiphany in Mrs. Panicker, as she realizes: “She had washed his bottom and combed his hair. She had . . . caught his vomit in a basin when he was sick. But she had never embraced him” (42). But embrace him she promptly does, for although the Panickers had extended every Christian decency to this small Jewish boy, they could not until this point get past their own lives’ shortcomings to truly connect with him. But now, riding with the old man, Mr. Panicker feels as though Linus has been miraculously revealed to him, amid the wreckage of his life and ambitions, as
an “odd and surprising treasure” that, “unknown, unobserved, had been there all along” (106). The murder and subsequent loss of the parrot have woken the couple from their solipsism, allowing them to recognize their love for the small boy in their care.

  Panicker accompanies the old man to town, beginning on the way to feel “a giddy and surprising optimism” and “a sense . . . that they were penetrating to the heart of some authentic mystery of London, or perhaps of life itself; that at last, in the company of this singular old gentleman whose command of mystery had at one time been spoken of as far away as Kerala, he might discover some elucidation of the heartbreaking clockwork of the world” (103–4). For a brief moment, Panicker experiences a glimmer of the old faith that caused him to want to leave India to become an Anglican vicar in the first place: a faith in the power of British rightness and ingenuity and a belief in the efficacy of rationality to solve any mystery, to find any answer. Just as the old man’s faith in these systems—and in himself—is waning or almost gone, Panicker feels a rejuvenated enthusiasm for adventure and projects himself into the role of Watson, implicitly embracing the mystery genre, alive with belief in its power to restore meaning and order to the chaotic world.

  The two men find the bird with Kalb who had been driving himself mad attempting to extract bank account numbers from him. Kalb is arrested for the murder of Mr. Shane, the parrot is returned to the boy, and the old man is finally afforded “the payment of a smile” from Linus (127). However, just as this seems a rather small, perhaps unsatisfying remuneration, The Final Solution is ultimately unable to tie up all its loose ends and restore a happy equilibrium. First, Panicker does not get his adventure and does not plumb the depths of the meaning of life and, rather, returns with the parrot, dejected and unsatisfied, “with his tail between his legs” (126). Second, although the bird (and murderer) are found, it is the boy who largely solves the case, not the old man (Linus finds a card for an exotic bird merchant in Kalb’s pocket). Further, although Bruno is hugely important to the boy, finding him serves in some ways only to highlight the immensity of what Linus has irretrievably lost. And finally, to the old man’s great consternation, they are unable to determine what made the parrot such an appealing target in the first place: they cannot discover the significance of those strings of German numbers. By the end, the old man begins even to question the very nature of the famous “creative intelligence” that had always served him so well. He realizes that rational deduction, “the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life” has led some men to outlandish, dangerous, even genocidal ideas (130): “One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things” (131). Thus, not only is the mystery novel—this mystery novel—unable to grapple with the deeper enigma of Hitler and his Final Solution, but the novel suggests that Hitler’s example of inexorable rationality taken to a lunatic extreme destroys for the old man the very basis of his belief in the accessibility of clear answers to any problem.