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extemporalli 's review for:
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
What a perfectly satisfying story - I was racing through to the end. Collins' work epitomises the best of the Victorian novel and the (then incipient) detective genre. I do not have anything particularly profound to say about Collins' social enlightenment, except to say that I didn't read his women as particularly subversive. Take Rachel Verinder's charming impetuousity and tendency to lapse into emotional outbursts- I'm fairly certain that is a trope of 19th century English writing, as was Rosanna Spearman, the doomed female servant. What I did find subversive, and more importantly interesting, were Collins' narratives of the story by servants and the middle class.
Another thing Collins seems to get disproportionate approbation for, is his attitudes towards the Hindu brahmins. They're certainly the most one-dimensional characters in the story, inserted as threat rather than as fully-realised persons, and, well, if it's the most disagreeable characters in his story that say the most egregiously racist things, Collins certainly doesn't attack this in his exposition. Despite that, a cool ending, probably. (It makes you wonder how much conflict could have been avoided if the white people had just made their damn reparations in returning the diamond!)
Another thing Collins seems to get disproportionate approbation for, is his attitudes towards the Hindu brahmins. They're certainly the most one-dimensional characters in the story, inserted as threat rather than as fully-realised persons, and, well, if it's the most disagreeable characters in his story that say the most egregiously racist things, Collins certainly doesn't attack this in his exposition. Despite that, a cool ending, probably. (It makes you wonder how much conflict could have been avoided if the white people had just made their damn reparations in returning the diamond!)