Set in the late 1840s, The Moonstone is about a glorious yellow diamond that was stolen in the fog of war from India by an Englishman in 1799. The man who stole it, you can probably already imagine, was a bit of jerk and, in what may be considered a passive aggressive curse, upon his death he leaves the Moonstone to his niece. The novel is too complex to explain the ins and outs of each character, but essentially the man’s niece, Rachel Verinder, is set to inherit the Moonstone on her birthday and in the days leading up a trio of mysterious Indian men show up at her mother’s estate whispering strange prophecies. Then, her cousin delivers the Moonstone and, after a series of events, the very night of Rachel’s birthday, the Moonstone disappears from her drawer.
The novel is an early and emblematic entry in the detective fiction genre and its influence can easily be read in later Victorian mysteries, like those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What I found surprising and exciting about the novel is that it rotates through various narrators with their distinct voices and purposes. The marks of The Moonstone’s serialization show themselves in the fact that the prologue is a sort of news report, then the novel starts with servant Gabriel Betteredge’s account of the events leading up to the party and the ultimate theft of the diamond. His account is likely the longest, but then we get a cavalcade of narrators writing their accounts of the theft and its ramifications. (Take an eye-breath: long sentence incoming). Among the more memorable of the narrators are, of course, Gabriel Betteredge, who is charmingly fastidious and has an endearing obsession with reading Robinson Crusoe, Mrs. Clack, another servant who is irritating beyond all hope, most particularly because she is a pedantic, proselytizing zealot who hides her unwanted religious tracts in every corner of the house, Franklin Blake, who is memorable mainly because so much of the action centres around him, and Ezra Jennings, a surprisingly ostracised medical assistant. I have to admit, the characters each had their own charm.
Overall, I’d have to say that Wilkie Collins’ characters are endearing, even when not fully fleshed out. Each had their own charm, pathos, and humour about them in their quirks. For a novel that centres around an object that inspires such obsession, the motif is carried through in the affectations of particular characters, whether it be through their strange periapts, addictions, or tightly-clung devotions to others. Being a mystery, character motivations are slowly revealed throughout the interlocking and staggered timelines of the narrative, which is a nice revelation each time since it allows you to reconsider the behaviours characters demonstrated earlier in the novel. That really gets highlighted by the tumultuous love story between Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder to satisfying effect.
In my view, Collins does a great job of presenting characters sympathetically, especially in his most tragic figures: Rosanna Spearman and Ezra Jennings. Rosanna is a former reformatory resident with a history of theft and supposedly a girl of less-than-desirable appearance. Working as a servant to the Verinder house, she experiences a great deal of illness and social ostracism. One day while avoiding her duties, Betteredge tries to make her feel better. She delivers a beautifully sad monologue while staring out at the quicksand, talking about her uneasy mind and how the place has set a spell on her. She offers a haunting imagining of bodies under the quicksand, reaching up and trying to resurface. When she ultimately commits suicide at that location (oddly parallel to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), mourning her impossible love, it is tragic (and mysterious—did she walk into the water with the diamond?). Ezra Jennings is the other character I found most likeable and most unfortunate. The reasons for his exclusion from society seems to rely on the fact that he is mixed race, so all kinds of things have become unavailable to him—his love, his physician ambitions, and so on. He comes across as having such a great heart with depth of feeling, tortured by his opium addiction. Towards the end, he, too, passes away and it’s surprisingly touching, given how selfless he has been throughout the story.
The alternating narratives give wonderful insight into the characters, and the narrational style offers some charming direct appeals to the reader. I don’t why I find that so endearing, but I do. It’s also interesting to me how in Betteredge’s narrative in particular (and maybe elsewhere, but I didn’t notice) there is a mix of past and present narration. At the same moment, a character -asked- a question to which someone -responds-. The simultaneity of the timeline is a peculiar affectation but it perhaps evokes the timelessness of the Moonstone’s hold on people.
The temptation with the review for a mystery novel is to unravel each of the steps of the mystery, the misdirections and red herrings, the big reveals, and so on. I will resist such a temptation here and limit myself to a few cursory comments. First, I appreciated the segments of the book that provide an deductive (or inductive, I suppose) account of events. It’s nice that there are plausible explanations where everything feels complete, only for Collins to subvert the narrative with an alternative account (and another, and another). At times, the narrative seemed to drag in its build up to the next big reveal. Generally, it was able to subsist on its more ‘human’ elements (like the love between Rachel and Franklin), but at other times there were ‘when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory’ stretches. At around the halfway point, I was ready to find out who stole the Moonstone and how it happened, and then the narrator changed and my interest was once more piqued.
The story is narratively pretty satisfying; despite the number of misdirections throughout the text, details take on retroactive significance in a way that feels meaningful and authentic. I can’t deny that the lead-up to the climax was exhilarating, even if it was a little silly. The climax relies a little too heavily on opium for my liking, and then the denouement didn’t feel as satisfying as some of the other false-endings throughout.
I don’t want to over-spoil the book, but there was a burning question on my mind throughout and I was pleasantly surprised to see how it turned out. Especially in our modern climate, to have a whole novel centred around English people reclaiming a stolen artefact that was itself stolen from one of its colonies. It becomes hard to root for the colonizers who stand to profit from reclaiming the stolen diamond. But Wilkie Collins does something interesting: the last section of the book is titled “The Finding of the Diamond.” The previous section unravelled the mystery and gave an account of the Moonstone’s movement. Knowing that the third section was titled “The Finding of the Diamond” from early on in my reading process, I admit that I wanted to know who, actually, would find it. It’s an interesting political statement, I think, that the Moonstone ends up back in India, presumably never to be reclaimed. It was again a surprising subversion from what I’d expect in a Victorian novel—and I’m curious to know which tone is meant to be achieved. Collins delivers some humorous tone throughout the book, and I’m curious whether the ending is meant to be ironic in a dark-funny way or whether it’s meant to be read as sincere and uplifting. It’s hard to determine, particularly because the Indian trio is presented as villainous throughout and we deal with the standard racism of the type and Orientalism, where anything East of England is presented as mysterious, uncivilized, and opium-obsessed.
Part of me wonders how Collins’ depictions of colonialism square with his scientific leanings and other political interests. Heart and Science is an anti-vivisectionist novel, and I’m given to understand he was an advocate for animals. Here, the novel’s climax does involve science, though it’s an unlikely experiment—ultimately, it does fail, which gives a somewhat convoluted sense of his priorities. The sympathetic character who is meant to be a scientifically-minded doctor fails at enacting science, but those who treat science more flippantly are successful, despite being more sinister in their actions (that said, when Franklin Blake finds out he was secretly drugged for trash-talking science his response is basically “haha those little rapscallions, they really got me!”). A tenth of the way through the novel, there’s a lengthy diatribe against scientific inquiry, presented here below to illuminate a parallel with Heart and Science and the antivivisectionist movement:
“Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life – the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see–especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort–-how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something—and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they are only making a mess in the house. I have seen them [....] go out, day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins through the miserable wretches, or cut them up, without a pang of remorse, into little pieces. You see my young mater, or my young mistress, poring over one of their spiders’ insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet one of their frogs walking down-stairs without his head—and when you wonder what the cruel nastiness means, you are told that it means a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history” (50-51).
Passages like that intrigue me as representatives of the discourse that was happening around science in 1850s England. It seems to have a moral impulse that gives me hope that the novel is potentially a (gentle) criticism of colonial England, given the problems associated with the theft of the Moonstone, the depiction of its initial thief as a degenerate, and the ending that suggests the Moonstone is back in its proper home. These are not to say that animal rights and anticolonialism are connected, but Collins seems progressive on those issues (as well as in terms of religion, where people are religious but ridiculed for being zealots). I can’t offer an unreserved ahistorical approval of everything in the book, but I do feel like Collins may have some merit as a social advocate [although one disabled character is routinely referred to as Limping Lucy, so that’s pretty awkward…].
Anyway, The Moonstone, while it had some sloggy bits, was overall a more enjoyable read than I expected. I’m glad I’ve been able to add this seminal crime novel into my repertoire of reads—I certainly enjoyed it more than my brief foray into Sherlock Holmes, actually, which is humourless and drab by comparison. The balance of story and character is achieved reasonably effective here in a way that seems particularly consistent for Victorians.
To the people that recommended this book to me that are extraordinarily unlikely to read this review, thanks for the recommendation. It was a good one!
Happy reading!
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