Masterful 'Solution'

Understated whodunit probes nature of good, evil

Geoffrey Bateman, Special To The News

Published November 19, 2004 at midnight

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This elegiac tale is as beautiful as it is strangely mysterious. Set in England near the end of World War II, it sweeps us into a murder story on the margins of world history, one that insinuates into our consciousness profound questions about the nature of good and evil. With characteristic skill, Michael Chabon achieves this through the masterfully plotted unfolding of an understated whodunit.

The story opens when a young boy with a gray parrot on his shoulder wanders into the sight of an old man reading The British Bee Journal in the comfort of his countryside cottage.

Warning the young boy away from an electric conductor rail that he is about to relieve himself on, the old man questions the boy about what he's up to. Initially, the only response he receives is the parrot's breathy lisping of a string of numbers ominously spoken in German.

After subsequent questions, the old man realizes the boy is a mute, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and the bird an African parrot with uncharacteristic intelligence. The appearance of this odd couple in such a remote area awakens his investigative instincts, which have lain long dormant since his retirement from his career as a once-famous detective.

"To encounter a solitary German, on the South Down, in July 1944, and a German boy at that," he thinks, "here was a puzzle to kindle old appetites and energies."

And indeed it does, for the appearance of Linus Steinman and the events that his presence incite bring the old man out of his self-imposed isolation and back into a world embroiled in a conflict of unimaginable significance.

A few days after this encounter, a young police inspector calls on the old man and invites him to the scene of a murder. A traveling salesman, Mr. Shane, is found dead outside the boarding house where he had been staying, which happens to be Linus' temporary home, as well. The boy's parrot is also missing.

After the inspector sketches out his theory of how he thinks the man was killed, the old man impatiently dismisses his pedestrian logic and through brilliant deductive reasoning lights on the less immediately evident but more accurate story of what actually happened.

Even as he incisively redirects the investigation and sees through unimportant distractions to the truth, the old man is prey to moments of confusion and profoundly disorienting spells that point to his decaying powers of detection.

Just as he reaches his conclusions, they hear a woman scream and find Linus standing forlornly on the roof waiting for the parrot's return. Overcome with a "vertiginous horror," the old man "felt - with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia - the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his own mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank, white scrap."

This spell passes quickly, but it leaves the old man humbled yet determined to solve the mystery. Even more powerful is his attachment to the young boy, for he considers it far more important to reunite Linus with his lost bird than to find the man who murdered Mr. Shane. Solving the murder becomes a means to comforting this silent, traumatized boy.

What emerges in this tightly woven story is a touching, yet strange affection between a silent Jewish boy scarred by the Holocaust and an elderly English detective whose mental sharpness is beginning to fail him.

This relationship only strengthens the title's suggestive power, for Chabon uses the final solution to signify most obviously the Nazi's horrific genocide of European Jews, but he also infuses an added layer of poignancy by inflecting the effects of such horror through the story of a genius detective's last case.

In one striking scene, the old man perversely wants to slap Linus when he tries to comfort him after a bee stings him. The boy's quiet pain and his incompetent attempt at comforting himself enrage the old man. His disgust serves as a painful reminder of our own inability to treat humanely those unlike ourselves, but it equally compels us, as it does the old man, to restore the dignity of those who have been rendered silent in our culture.

Without giving away the end of the story - it is a mystery, after all - I have to point out that as much as the story fails to come to a full understanding of both its own mystery and the inexplicable horrors of World War II, Chabon isn't content to allow the old man to retire into dark cynicism and hopelessness.

As he brings closure to the case, the old man recognizes the possibility "(t)hat it was the insoluble problems - the false leads and the cold cases - that reflected the true nature of things."

Even so, he ironically corrects himself: "One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might."

And yet again, one might not. And as the parrot sings, its lyric inexplicability bringing the story to an end, Chabon melodically asserts our ability, however imperfect, to solve the most difficult of questions and bring order, however contingent, to our experiences.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches writing at CU-Boulder and is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military.

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