Sherlock Holmes discovers the limits of reason at last

An elderly Sherlock is still a magnetic character, in a novel of self-discovery.

Ian McKellen, who will play Holmes in the film of Cullin’s novel. Matteo Prandoni / BFAnyc.com / REX / May 2014

At the heart of Mitch Cullin's stunning novel are the sweet ethereal tones of the glass armonica, the musical instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin made up of 30-odd blown glass hemispheres, varying in size, mounted horizontally along an iron spindle, rotated using a foot treadle, the sound created by the player running a moistened finger across the surface of the glass, as when one coaxes a hum from a drinking glass.

The instrument fell out of fashion by the end of the 19th century as without ready amplification it was unsuitable for performances in large concert halls, but “certain disturbances” were also attributed to the strange music: “Everything from nerve damage to nagging depression, as well as domestic disputes, premature births, any number of mortal afflictions – even convulsions in household pets.”

We are furnished with this information by none other than Sherlock Holmes, the armonica player in question an unhappy woman, who, nearly 50 years after he encountered her, still haunts the great detective’s now fading mind, his memory of her as mournful and melancholy as the “plaintive, unending” tones of the instrument she played.

The year is 1947 and a now 97-year-old Holmes, having outlived the other characters we know so well from Conan Doyle's tales, has swapped 221B Baker Street for a picturesque cottage in Sussex, where he spends his days working on his four-volume masterpiece The Whole Art of Detection and revising his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, bee-keeping having long since replaced sleuthing as his consuming passion. His reputation is unblemished, Watson's jaunty narratives of their adventures together having firmly fixed him in the public's mind; occasional desperate souls still seek out his help and he's also plagued by autograph hunters and journalists.

Now, in the twilight of his life, Holmes’s interests are limited to his apiary, assisted by Roger, the 13-year-old son of his housekeeper, and the search for nature’s life-lengthening elixirs: royal jelly, which he spreads upon his breakfast toast every morning; and prickly ash, a native Japanese plant known for its health-giving properties, the search for which takes him to post-war Japan, a land of terrible beauty and destruction.

As the guest of one Mr Umezaki, Holmes soon realises that his host is less concerned with prickly ash and more preoccupied with what the sleuth can tell him about his long-lost father, who Umezaki insists abandoned him and his mother after seeking advice from Holmes roughly four decades earlier in London.

As Holmes gropes around blindly in the increasingly empty recesses of his memory searching for the answer Umezaki wants, he finds himself drawn again to his encounter with the armonica player, the tendrils of this particular memory still exercising a surprisingly firm and fast grip on his otherwise fallible mind.

People have always needed things from Holmes and despite the lack of a straightforward “case” in Cullin’s tale, he becomes something of a surrogate father for both Roger and Umezaki – he’s still quick-witted enough to note that the disappearance of Umezaki’s father coincided with the arrival of Watson’s embellished deerstalker-wearing, pipe-smoking version of himself on the teenager’s bookshelf.

That Roger too is of a similar age suggests Cullin is looking beyond his own text here, recognising the role Holmes has played in many a fevered male adolescent imagination. Cullin balances the delicacy of the relationships between Holmes and this man and boy beautifully, not simply in the depiction of the “psychic wounds of childhood”, but so too in the surprising capacities of Holmes’s compassion and love.

But this isn’t a simple case of a cocksure young author attempting to show another side to the great detective. This is a considered and melancholic portrait of a man who has lived his entire life driven by logic and reason – a man introduced to the world as possessing “a passion for definite and exact knowledge”, whose scientific approach to life bordered on “coldbloodedness” – realising at the very end of his days just how “unjust” reality is, how arbitrary and illogical existence is in “such a mutable inconsistent world”. This is a striking, moving portrait of a lonely old man thus shaken to his very core.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.