Book Review by Vladimir Paz: Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

That my local Barnes and Noble bookstore was touting a Sherlock Holmes detective story for Summer reading, made me curious. With some hesitation I purchased The Hound of the Baskervilles and read it quickly.

Before long, I realized why I hadn't read Conan Doyle in a long time: Sherlock's cruelty toward Watson is tasteless; not to say rude. But one cannot help thinking that the ill treatment may be due to Watson's obseqious nature. Ah, yes--let's not ignore the pipe and the violin props--a trick that today seems bizarre if not laughable.

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes," says Sherlock Homes, stating the obvious and letting the reader think this is a deep observation. Along the novel we find many similar platitudes.

Were it not for the well balanced sentences, this detection story--a horror story, with elements of the supernatural--would not have merited to be revived. Now the supernatural turns out to be a distraction--much like Ann Radcliffe's Udolfo--and not much of a redherring.

If one applies Todorov's theory of "hesitation" --as to whether both the reader and the characters believe for a moment they might have entered a supernatural world--one would find no such a thing in this novel.

And where was Holmes for two thirds of the book? An absentee detective who lets Watson do all the leg work and detection.

What is admirable is Conan Doyle's mastery of English syntax as well as the lavish display of sentence variation. This I liked. The narrative is flooded with a great variety of openers: prepositional phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, and reversions.

Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle uses the "d" sound to elicit visceral reactions ("The night-air was heavy with the smell of damp and decay.") Yet, in the final scenes where the hound appears and the crime is solved, we find no rhetorical resources to create tension, suspense, and violence. We find neither appositives nor absolutes, which invariably adds simultaneity to the narrative. In this respect, Conan Doyle's prose is much inferior to that of Rafael Sabatini. And if we compare The Hound to a contemporary work such as Guerrero's Poison Pill--a novel in which Absolutes and Appositives carry the action--one would find The Hound of he Baskervilles flat and tepid.

Despite the obvious flaws, however, this book will survive and will delight generations to come, not because it is a masterpiece, but because it is a naive work yet sincere in its effort to entertain.