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maplemoodI was lukewarm on this book when I first read it in high school and ended up loving it on reread, though it's still a headscratcher in certain ways. Everything else is going under a cut, thanks to a first-chapter spoiler that doesn't have much to do with the mystery itself but is still extremely spoiler-y for AMRoW's main relationship. If you know, you know.
This is the book where Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel get married. Not in the first chapter--in the first chapter, Holmes suggests that Mary wants to marry him, and then she flips off the back of a hansom cab to escape, which is a reasonable reaction. The truth, though, is that she does want to marry him, and the only thing holding her back is not that a.) she's twenty-one and he's fifty-nine, b.) in some ways he almost raised her, or c.) living full-time with Sherlock Holmes would be a nightmare. Instead, Mary's mostly worried about the changing nature of their friendship, and that the tension from their sexual (?) attraction will shake things up irrevocably. Which it obviously does; she just has to get involved with a feminist religious organization, get kidnapped and addicted to heroin, and solve a mystery in order to make her peace with that.
So, yeah. This is a very weird book.
Some people are deeply skeeved out by the romance (fair), but I'm not one of those people. It mostly just kind of befuddles me in ways that I appreciate more now than I did a couple years ago. Their relationship is really based on intellect, not passion. ("Without intellect, there could be no love.") It's not asexual, but Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel are pretty much the one fictional couple that I just can't picture having sex, and I've never been able to pin down exactly why. It's not that their attraction is unconvincing, and I can absolutely get behind a relationship built on shared interests and affection and respect instead of burning passion...but thinking about this book, I always have a sense that getting married changes so little about their relationship that it's hard to understand why they did marry, and why Mary was so worried about it in the first place.
To be honest, that's probably the point. The Mary Russel/Sherlock Holmes relationship is supposed to be (I think) so essential to both of them that the exact form it takes isn't actually that important. They're intellectual equals and they understand each other; everything else is just window dressing. Maybe. Or maybe because my way of thinking about love (as something that, for better or worse, goes beyond intellect) is so different from Mary's, I'm willfully misreading what's going on between them. That's definitely a possibility.
The mystery is interesting, but not the main draw of the book, at least for me. One of the things I do appreciate about this series is that so far it's been emotional journeys and character studies first, and whodunnits second. Sort of similar to the Cass Neary books in that one specific way.
This is the book where Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel get married. Not in the first chapter--in the first chapter, Holmes suggests that Mary wants to marry him, and then she flips off the back of a hansom cab to escape, which is a reasonable reaction. The truth, though, is that she does want to marry him, and the only thing holding her back is not that a.) she's twenty-one and he's fifty-nine, b.) in some ways he almost raised her, or c.) living full-time with Sherlock Holmes would be a nightmare. Instead, Mary's mostly worried about the changing nature of their friendship, and that the tension from their sexual (?) attraction will shake things up irrevocably. Which it obviously does; she just has to get involved with a feminist religious organization, get kidnapped and addicted to heroin, and solve a mystery in order to make her peace with that.
So, yeah. This is a very weird book.
Some people are deeply skeeved out by the romance (fair), but I'm not one of those people. It mostly just kind of befuddles me in ways that I appreciate more now than I did a couple years ago. Their relationship is really based on intellect, not passion. ("Without intellect, there could be no love.") It's not asexual, but Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russel are pretty much the one fictional couple that I just can't picture having sex, and I've never been able to pin down exactly why. It's not that their attraction is unconvincing, and I can absolutely get behind a relationship built on shared interests and affection and respect instead of burning passion...but thinking about this book, I always have a sense that getting married changes so little about their relationship that it's hard to understand why they did marry, and why Mary was so worried about it in the first place.
To be honest, that's probably the point. The Mary Russel/Sherlock Holmes relationship is supposed to be (I think) so essential to both of them that the exact form it takes isn't actually that important. They're intellectual equals and they understand each other; everything else is just window dressing. Maybe. Or maybe because my way of thinking about love (as something that, for better or worse, goes beyond intellect) is so different from Mary's, I'm willfully misreading what's going on between them. That's definitely a possibility.
The mystery is interesting, but not the main draw of the book, at least for me. One of the things I do appreciate about this series is that so far it's been emotional journeys and character studies first, and whodunnits second. Sort of similar to the Cass Neary books in that one specific way.