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buddhafish 's review for:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
145th book of 2020.
Thrilling and compelling: the best Sherlock Holmes book yet. The supernatural and Gothic elements only elevate the story, the mystery and the intrigue. Doyle writes in far more detail than his other stories, creating the foggy moors, the faded landscapes and the dark woods. The setting isn't unlike Wuthering Heights, there are echoes of Fowles' The Collector, the hound itself, black and spectral, reminds me of Winston Churchill's 'black dog', which was what he coined his depression, and in turn, the dogs of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs - which are also, are they not, a metaphor, a very real one, for depression? The black dog is far reaching, then.
There are, unsurprisingly, many mysteries within the book and many twists-and-turns in the narrative. The two most interesting and compelling things about the book are: firstly, the hound itself (my blurb ends with the question, "But is it really something unearthly that walks there?"), and secondly, that Watson spends a great deal of time at Baskerville House alone and without Sherlock Holmes. This spins the mystery further: without Holmes' genius, Watson is left to guesswork, a few mistakes... We are struggling along with him. I don't read at all in the genre of crime and/or thriller, nor do I watch any television of the kind, so I would argue my mind isn't trained in guessing, but I foresaw none of the answers in the book; throughout the novel I was surprised at every new revelation. (Perhaps, though, I am easily surprised.)
Thrilling and compelling: the best Sherlock Holmes book yet. The supernatural and Gothic elements only elevate the story, the mystery and the intrigue. Doyle writes in far more detail than his other stories, creating the foggy moors, the faded landscapes and the dark woods. The setting isn't unlike Wuthering Heights, there are echoes of Fowles' The Collector, the hound itself, black and spectral, reminds me of Winston Churchill's 'black dog', which was what he coined his depression, and in turn, the dogs of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs - which are also, are they not, a metaphor, a very real one, for depression? The black dog is far reaching, then.
There are, unsurprisingly, many mysteries within the book and many twists-and-turns in the narrative. The two most interesting and compelling things about the book are: firstly, the hound itself (my blurb ends with the question, "But is it really something unearthly that walks there?"), and secondly, that Watson spends a great deal of time at Baskerville House alone and without Sherlock Holmes. This spins the mystery further: without Holmes' genius, Watson is left to guesswork, a few mistakes... We are struggling along with him. I don't read at all in the genre of crime and/or thriller, nor do I watch any television of the kind, so I would argue my mind isn't trained in guessing, but I foresaw none of the answers in the book; throughout the novel I was surprised at every new revelation. (Perhaps, though, I am easily surprised.)