Book Review: The Moonstone, by Willkie Collins (1868)

Given that literature is taught in such a confusing way these days, it is remarkably easy for even a highly-educated person to get through their school years without understanding a very important distinction between "classic" novels written before World War I and "classic" novels written after World War I. These days, most of the attention goes to the great novels of the early and middle part of the 20th Century: the works of men like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. For most college-educated Americans, books like The Sound and the Fury or The Great Gatsby are what we think of as "literature" -- they are generally depressing books with some sort of tragic message about the difficulty of life. Even when teachers seek out novels from earlier periods, they tend to look for novels featuring moral dilemmas -- like The Scarlet Letter or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Number 1 Son has told me, his English classes have taught him that all literature is about "the Death of Innocence" and "Man's Inhumanity to Man."

So when middle-aged people head to the bookstore looking for something to read, they tend to avoid the great novels of the 19th Century -- with the lone exception of Jane Austen, who everyone knows from TV. And this is a real shame. Because the emotional and spiritual background of the 19th-Century English-speaking world was very different from the post-World War I environment that so dominates our conception of what constitutes "literature." Faulkner, Hemingway and the like wrote their moral parables for a particular class of highly-educated people who were disgusted with the world around them. But in the 19th Century, this same class tended to be much more optimistic about how mankind was doing. And even to the extent they were disappointed in their fellow man, they were much more likely to express that disappointment in other forms. The true progenitors of the modern problem novel are not novels at all; they are books of essays like Walden or the works of Emerson, or the poems of Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman, or even the critical essays of men like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold.

Serious 19th-Century writers didn't usually put their deepest concerns in the form of novels, for much the same reason that serious writers today wouldn't usually put their darkest work in the form of a network TV show. Before radio and the movies, novels were primarily a form of entertainment. Victorian novels, in particular, have a lot more in common with our modern television shows than with the works of J.D. Salinger. When you see a Victorian novel on the shelf of a modern bookstore, you are probably looking at the 19th-Century equivalent of something like Dallas or The Sopranos, or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. They're not all like that, of course; the Victorians did produce works like The Red Badge of Courage or Silas Marner. But, of course, we've produced our share of depressing movies and TV shows. The point is, that great Victorian novels are usually designed to entertain in a way very different from their modern brethren.

One of the most entertaining novels of that remarkably productive era is The Moonstone, written in 1868 by Willkie Collins, who was trying to score a follow up to his monster hit of the early 1860's: The Woman in White. He succeeded by effectively inventing the first modern detective novel. Chesterton said it was "probably the best detective tale in the world," and praise from the creator of Father Brown should be taken seriously on this point. Like all successful works of great originality, it has been imitated so many times that almost everything about it now seems familiar even to those reading it for the first time. It is the story of a mysterious Indian diamond -- the legendary Moonstone -- which may or may not be cursed, and which is left to a beautiful young Englishwoman who lives on a big estate in the country. On the night after a dinner party to celebrate the Englishwoman's birthday party, the Diamond disappears. Who is the thief? Why is the young Englishwoman acting so suspicious? Why does one of the servants keep disappearing at odd times? And what is the role of three mysterious Indians who have been seen in the neighborhood?

To answer these questions, Collins tells his story through a series of different narrators, most of whom are only somewhat reliable. This approach, which Collins had also used in The Woman in White, works very well -- particularly as Collins uses the narrators (who are, for the most part, only minor players in the tale) to add humor to a story that would otherwise grow too melodramatic. It is quite long -- around 450 pages or so -- but that's because it's really more like a TV series than a modern novel, and its complicated plot simply takes time to work out. It also features the remarkable Sergeant Cuff, a brilliant detective who prefers studying roses to catching criminals.

The Moonstone was a big hit the 1860s and has remained popular ever since. It can be found at any good bookstore, or downloaded for almost nothing on your Kindle. It has everything one normally seeks in beach reading -- romance, suspense, comedy, and clear indications that nothing too tragic is going to happen during the course of the story. If your experience with literature has taught you that any novel published by the Modern Library must end horribly, this would be an excellent corrective.

Essential reading for anyone who likes detective stories; highly recommended for anyone who just wants to curl up with a good book.