The Moonstone – Review

The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

I really enjoyed it. Although it was a tad slow to get going, I relished the fact that it had all the elements of a classic detective novel:

1. The settings are exciting. Much of it is set in a manor house, complete with wealthy young lady and a full set of servants, cooks and butler, all of whom are suspects. Many other scenes happen at the very melodramatic 'Shivering Sands' - a beach on the dangerous coastline characterised by its treacherous quicksand.
2. The bumbling local policeman is replaced by a private detective who asks enigmatic questions and stands pensively at the window whistling whilst his brain whirs.
3. A suspicious character is trailed through the streets.
4. Someone is in disguise, and the false beard is ripped from his very face.
5. Many people are hiding the truth, only telling half the truth, literally burying the truth, genuinely forgetting the truth...

The coolest one really was number 5. This whole book was characterised by silence and hiding, which seems like a pretty obvious statement considering it was a mystery novel, but this theme came through in a lot of different ways. One character died, taking her side of the story with her. Another character lost his memory, meaning that his version of events had to be pieced together from his subconscious fever-dream ramblings. Some clues were buried (they actually had to be dug up from underground). More than one person turned out to be lying or obscuring the truth to protect the person they had fallen in love with. And underpinning it all was the idea of opium, a drug which wreaked absolute havoc by causing people to act unconsciously and then forget everything.

As such, it was really quite a complicated mystery, and Collins very skilfully kept us readers in the dark until literally the last moment. There were so many false accusations that even the professional detective was totally wrong, and I myself came to at least 4 different conclusions of who-done-it throughout the duration of the novel. None of my guesses were fully correct (although to my credit, some of them were close!).

Collins's main technique for keeping us confused was his use of multiple narrators. The story was told by ten different people, each contributing their perspective. Each person knew things - or discovered things - that the other narrators couldn't possibly know, as well as each having their own pre-conceived suspicions and biases. This enabled Collins to hide things from us, to show us the same mystery from a different angle, to slowly build up the evidence from multiple witnesses. I found out from Sandra Kemp's introductory notes at the beginning of my edition that this structure was inspired by Collins's experience of a criminal trial, in which a whole story could be discovered via a series of witness statements.

The introductory notes were absolutely fascinating - a better term for them would be 'critical analysis' I think. Kemp had some intriguing perspectives to offer on Collins's use of character and symbolism, which I loved, but one thing that surprised me was her assertion that Collins was quite progressive. Whilst reading 'The Moonstone', I more often found myself thinking the opposite: that this book was quite 'of its time'.

Kemp wrote that Collins's female characters were subtly powerful and unconventional. There is a servant called Rosanna who spends a lot of the novel infatuated with a man called Franklin Blake. Her love is not reciprocated due to her class and the fact that she is not especially good-looking, and she takes her own life. Kemp argues that Collins is championing the lower classes by turning a small plain servant into a living, breathing, emotional character, and by highlighting the fact that such girls often go unnoticed by people like Franklin Blake. I can see where she's coming from, but I would have preferred to see Rosanna represented as a stronger woman, rather than a hopeless romantic we only ever see fawning over a man and feeling worthless without his approval. Ultimately we just end up pitying her, which to me doesn't do a huge amount to reverse the stereotype of servant girls being weak and lowly.

The progressiveness of his presentation of British colonialism is also debatable. The Moonstone is actually the property of the Indians, which is never acknowledged by any of the characters. There are three Indian men who frequently appear in the book - they are after the Moonstone, and are presented as thieves and enemies. In reality it is the other way round, and the English have stolen the Moonstone from them. Having said that, the Moonstone is never returned to Rachel Verinder to whom it was bequeathed, but is seen at the end of the book back in India in the head of the Hindu deity from which it was originally looted. The fact that Collins's ending doesn't necessarily resolve the detective story, but does provide a morally happy ending, does seem to suggest a more progressive view.

Overall, then, I was greatly enthralled by the mystery and all its classic ingredients, and almost as enthralled by the debates explored in the introductory notes!