A MARVELOUS MODERNIZATION: Dr. Watson as Blogger

I always have mixed feelings about updatings of literary classics. I love to see them build new readerships for long-ago books, yet I am also enough of a stickler to bristle at some of the inaccuracies that happen in the process.

I therefore felt a suitably dark chill of foreboding on discovering this fall that PBS' Masterpiece Mystery would be airing Sherlock, a series they airily described as "Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century." I've been a passionate lover of Holmes since adolescence—I even wrote an essay on his apartment for a literary journal. Part of the richness of the stories, for me, is the very nineteenth-century world that Holmes inhabits. So modernizing Sherlock, to my mind, was playing with (a cozy but nonetheless dangerous coal) fire.

Well, I need not have worried. Sherlock wasn't just good; it was brilliant. Benedict Cumberbatch is pitch-perfect as the contradictory and semi-sociopathic Holmes, while Mark Freeman is equally good as the doggedly loyal Watson, now a veteran of the Afghanistan wars of our own time. Good as they are, it's the writing that's the real star. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, who clearly know the original stories backwards and forewards, stick closely enough to the smallest element of Doyle's imaginings to satisfy us Sherlockians, yet also move them to modern London without a hitch. In fact, what's surprising is how utterly convincing Holmes and Watson seem as young inhabitants of a London filled with cell phones and computers, GPS and Goths. I loved almost every detail, right down to the fact that this new Watson posts his stories of Holmes through a blog...a reimagining that is both entirely modern, and entirely consistent with the spirit of the original.
When an adaptation is done this well, it does two really valuable things. First and most obviously, it introduces a classic to a whole new generation, meeting them where they are before beckoning them back into the past. Equally important, maybe, it shows existing "fans" just how rich the text they love can be. I wasn't just impressed with the folks that created this new Sherlock as I watched it; I was reminded of Conan Doyle's own gifts. Unusual psyches, unequal friendships, bumbling officials, fussy landladies, mysterious older brothers, a world filled with unbalanced people and unexpected challenges: the core of the Sherlock Holmes characters and premises he created is at once classically Victorian and completely timeless, an accomplishment to which I tip my imaginary top hat.

I'm posting this review very belatedly. But you may be able to catch the three episodes of this new Sherlock on your local PBS station, and you can also buy it (or perhaps borrow it from a library) from PBS and other vendors on DVD.

AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

Sam Sattler's blog, Book Chase, has this as its quote of the moment: Mark Twain's “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Very amusing, and new to me. You might think that I, well known to be a "Janeite," would bristle at this, but in fact I always forgive harsh criticism as long as it is funny. (Well, harsh criticism of others' books, at least.) I don't know what bugged Mr. Clemens about Miss Austen, though I could certainly hazard a score or two of guesses, or why he chose the shin-bone in particular. It sounds sort of like a Great Books version of the game Clue, doesn't it?— Mr. Twain, in the Library, with the Shin-bone.