What a marvellously entertaining book, full of the “detective fever” as one of the main characters of The Moonstone would say !! It was a fairly new concept in the 1860s and this story was rightly hailed as a first. It was originally published in episodes (faithfully reproduced in my edition, so that the reader who wishes to experience the reading thrills of the Victorians, waiting patiently between each episode, can do so) in Charles Dickens’s magazine All The Year Round, and later adapted for the stage in 1877. But it is also full of romance, friendship, social commentary, and humour.
A dashing young gentleman, Franklin Blake, returns to the house he was raised in in Yorkshire to gift his cousin Rachel with a unique and magnificent gem, the Moonstone. The gem was left to Rachel by her uncle, Colonel Herncastle, who is believed to have stolen it from a sacred shrine during a battle somewhere in the British Indian Empire. It thus carries a curse, all the more so because three Brahmins have since then been on the hunt for it, to return it to its original place and appease the God of the Moon. But as soon as the diamond is given to Rachel on her 18th birthday, and after she shows it off on a beautiful dress at her dinner party, the Moonstone is stolen. The house is in turmoil. The first of a legendary array of fictional detectives is introduced, the taciturn Sergeant Cuff. He is confronted with strange events: Rachel, clearly shaken, refuses to help with the investigation and develops a sudden anger and hatred for her beloved Franklin. A hunchbacked housemaid, a former thief given a second chance at normal life, starts behaving erratically. And what about those Indian jugglers always seen around town and around the estate? Betteredge the butler is baffled and saddened by the whole situation. The household he has loved and cared about for his whole life is engulfed in a nightmare. Is the diamond really cursed?
The Moonstone is an epistolary novel and this is well suited for showing off the different characters in the story, as they tell it. As Collins explains in the preface, he attempted “to trace the influence of character on circumstance”, or how people act under certain emergencies. Through the direct narratives of the larger-than-life Betteredge, the existentialist and impulsive Blake, the hilarious religious spinster miss Clack, and others, Collins not only gives us a mystery to savour but also a precise and very progressive critic of his time. Class differences are questioned and mocked, English respectability is uncovered, warts and all, by the drama unfolding (the schemings, money dealings and debt), objectivity and subjectivity are discussed (how human beings arrive at conclusions and how they are often easily misled). Most astonishingly, the book is also a barely disguised critique of the materialism of the Empire, and the intrusion of the British upon a spiritual world they can hardly grasp and that they see as preposterous.
A summery or a wintery feel-good read yes, but one that also gives intellectual satisfaction.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
My edition : Wordsworth Classics, UK, 1999 (Intro by David Blair)
434 pages
Bookish Felix 