At first the lines above seem a little bit like the musings of Watson before recounting one of Holmes' great adventures. But this novel becomes somewhat awkward when we understand that these words are put in the mouth of the simple groundskeeper whom Collins has chosen to narrate his tale. But more on that in a moment.
The Moonstone is another one of those books on my shelf that has a good story attached to it. In my last two years of my undergraduate degree it was Victorian Literature much more than Medieval that had grasped my fancy. Motivated by the Gothic and Romantic vein of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein I had developed a great affinity for the literature of England's most decadent and most depressing literary eras. Resultingly I developed quite a rapport with my department's Victorian specialist, a professor for whom I have a profound degree of respect for both her strong Feminist beliefs as well as the purposeful strictness with which she ran her classroom. Around graduation time it was customary for the English Department to hold a little luncheon which gave faculty and students a chance to mingle in a less formal setting as well as say their farewells. As is fitting for the English folk, most of these farewells were delivered in the forms of books. Tragically my professor was not present but she left this book in the care of our Department Chair to present at the luncheon. Accordingly it was the first book I read during my summer as an unemployed graduate...
If I were to describe the book in a single sentence I would say that I imagine this to be the result of Charlotte Bronte having read a great deal of Arthur Conan Doyle. The Moonstone takes place on an aristocratic estate and involves the mystery and intrigue surrounding the theft of a precious gem that had been stolen while a group of characters had been on a military tour in India. There is a love story intertwined and the cathartic death of the villain but the most significant aspect of the novel in my memory was its narrative mode.
The story was related in the first person by a man named Betteredge, a groundskeeper/butler to the estate on which the book is set and an unaccountable fanatic of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It is his words which appear above. Now, I have read Robinson Crusoe and despite its supposed fame as one of the first modern English novels I cannot say much to the book's moral or aesthetic merit. Yet the narrator, this Betteredge, whenever events become confusing or difficult, rather than turn his eyes to some religious or philosophical text, somehow manages, within the context of his narration, glean insight from a tale about a man trapped on an island and describing every boring detail of his survival... Now if said butler had been reading Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy I might understand but Defoe? I'm really not sure what Collins was thinking. The only thing I can imagine is that Crusoe maybe had some kind of contemporary cultural significance that is currently lost on me. But be that as it may, I can't say that this at all interferes with the book. Collins' novel is quite fun, slightly slow at parts and not as difficult a mystery as most of Doyle's work, but entertaining nonetheless and an undoubtedly interesting study in Victorian pop-literature.
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Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005.
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