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First Published:
Apr 2005, 272 pages
Paperback:
May 2006, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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This subtle and wise work is more than a re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes but a profound meditation on faultiness of memory and how, as we grow older, the way we see the world is inevitably altered.
Mitch Cullin's engrossing A Slight Trick of the Mind is an original portrait of
literature's most beloved detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the twilight of his
illustrious life.
Holmes--"a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of
heroic passion"--is famous for his powers of deduction. His world is made up of
hard evidence and uncontestable facts, his observations and conclusions
unsullied by personal feelings, until novelist Cullin goes behind the cold,
unsentimental surface to reveal for the first time the inner world of an
obsessively private man.
It is 1947, and the long-retired Holmes, now 93, lives in a remote Sussex
farmhouse, where his memories and intellect begin to go adrift. He lives with a
housekeeper and her young son, Roger, whose patient, respectful demeanor stirs
paternal affection in Holmes. Holmes has settled into the routine of tending his
apiary, writing in journals, and grappling with the diminishing powers of his
razor-sharp mind, when Roger comes upon a case hitherto unknown. It is that of a
Mrs. Keller, the long-ago object of Holmes's deep--and never
acknowledged--infatuation.
As Mitch Cullin weaves together Holmes's hidden past, his poignant struggle
to retain mental acuity, and his unlikely relationship with Roger, Holmes is
transformed from the machine-like, mythic figure into an ordinary man,
confronting and acquiescing to emotions he has resisted his entire life. This
subtle and wise work is more than just a reimagining of a classic character. It
is a profound meditation on faultiness of memory and how, as we grow older, the
way we see the world is inevitably altered.
Chapter 1
Upon arriving from his travels abroad, he entered his stone-built farmhouse on a summer's afternoon, leaving the luggage by the front door for his housekeeper to manage. He then retreated into the library, where he sat quietly, glad to be surrounded by his books and the familiarity of home. For almost two months, he had been away, traveling by military train across India, by Royal Navy ship to Australia, and then finally setting foot on the occupied shores of postwar Japan. Going and returning, the same interminable routes had been taken–usually in the company of rowdy enlisted men, few of whom acknowledged the elderly gentleman dining or sitting beside them (that slow-walking geriatric, searching his pockets for a match he'd never find, chewing relentlessly on an unlit Jamaican cigar). Only on the rare occasions when an informed officer might announce his identity would the ruddy faces gaze with amazement, assessing him in that moment:...
Cullin's Holmes is a rather nice old fellow. He's still the exceptionally acute observer he always was, but age has added a welcome layer of humanity to his character. Not only has he lost "the arrogance of my youth", but as he points out, he never was the person people took him to be - he never wore a deerstalker or smoked a pipe, these - he says - were just figments of the illustrator's imagination; and he's quite willing to admit that he and John ("you know, I never did call him Watson--he was John, simply John") bungled a number of important cases but "of course, who wants to read about the failures?"..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
Mitch Cullin has written a loving, sad tale of Sherlock Holmes in the era of
Hiroshima, a Holmes who is not entirely sure of his powers, but who has come
into his own humanity. When I was a child I believed that Holmes was a real
person. After reading A Slight Trick of the Mind, I know he is. Karl Iagnemma, author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction
What a pleasure it was to re-enter Sherlock Holmes's world, and find the
aged detective as intelligent and observant as I'd remembered. In Mitch Cullin's
imagination, however, Holmes is more pensive and wistful--more human--than ever
before. A Slight Trick of the Mind is an elegant meditation on memory and
mortality, brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, full of subtlety and
wisdom and grace. Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona: A Novel
As he explores the mysteries of fatherless boys and childless men, Mitch Cullin transports his reader effortlessly from post-war Japan to Edwardian London. A Slight Trick of the Mind is both intricate and absorbing, a novel of unusual range and depth.The armonica is a musical instrument constructed of graduated glass bowls with holes and corks in the center. It was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761. He was inspired to create it having heard a concert played on wine glasses! For a time armonicas were all the rage, Marie Antoinette (who, incidentally, historians say never did utter the famous words, "let them eat cake") took lessons, and famous composers of the day, such as Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss, wrote music for it. In the mid 1800s it lost popularity and gradually vanished because people came to believe that armonicas drove performers mad and evoked the spirits of the dead. In 1982, the late master glass blower, Gerhard Finkenbeiner, of Massachusetts, revived the ...
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