2010/34: The Beekeeper's Apprentice -- Laurie R. King
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthThe Beekeeper's Apprentice -- Laurie R. King
One day in 1915, a teenage girl with her nose in a book practically trips over a retired detective on the South Downs. It's not an auspicious meeting: he mistakes her for a boy, earning the scornful rejoinder that it's probably a good thing he's retired, then.
Despite their initial antipathy, it quickly becomes clear that this is a meeting of minds. In Mary Russell (fifteen, feminist, brilliant, independent, Jewish, orphaned, and unhappy), Sherlock Holmes finds an equal partner of a kind he's never had: Russell, for her part, finds a father-figure (which sits slightly uncomfortably with me, given developments in later books), a mentor and a friend.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice spans the first four years of their association, and a variety of cases (from local robbery to German spies to a slow-cooked revenge). Mary Russell soon discovers that Holmes's retirement is more of a polite fiction; she gets to know the man behind the stories, which have been somewhat embellished ("I deduce, Miss Russell: Watson transforms") and, in the process, comes to understand herself rather better too.
The characters are true to canon, though I'm not keen on King's Watson, who is as bumbling and slow as any of the early film/TV adaptations that made him a comic foil for Holmes. Mrs Hudson is delightful. (And sharp.) And I can certainly extrapolate this Holmes -- ageing gracefully but in full command of his formidable skills, doing intelligence work for Mycroft, bored to distraction once the war's over and he's left without purpose -- from Arthur Conan Doyle's creation.
If I call this 'fan fiction' it's not in any derogatory sense. It takes canon, shares the author's knowledge, affection and joy therein with the reader -- who may well know more about Holmes than Mary Russell does, at least initially -- and uses that canon as the foundation of something new. I confess when I first heard of Mary Russell, I did pointedly enquire if her middle name was by any chance 'Sue': but Russell is a well-rounded individual in her own right, and though she is an excellent counterpart to Holmes, it's Russell herself rather than her mentor (or her relationship with him) who is the focus of this and subsequent novels.
This self-contained individual, this man who had rarely allowed even his sturdy, ex-Army companion Watson to confront real risk, who had habitually ... held back, been cautious, kept an eye out and otherwise protected me; this man who was a Victorian gentleman down to his boots; this man was now proposing to place not only his life and limb into my untested, inexperienced and above all female hands, but my own life as well. (p. 257)
One day in 1915, a teenage girl with her nose in a book practically trips over a retired detective on the South Downs. It's not an auspicious meeting: he mistakes her for a boy, earning the scornful rejoinder that it's probably a good thing he's retired, then.
Despite their initial antipathy, it quickly becomes clear that this is a meeting of minds. In Mary Russell (fifteen, feminist, brilliant, independent, Jewish, orphaned, and unhappy), Sherlock Holmes finds an equal partner of a kind he's never had: Russell, for her part, finds a father-figure (which sits slightly uncomfortably with me, given developments in later books), a mentor and a friend.
The Beekeeper's Apprentice spans the first four years of their association, and a variety of cases (from local robbery to German spies to a slow-cooked revenge). Mary Russell soon discovers that Holmes's retirement is more of a polite fiction; she gets to know the man behind the stories, which have been somewhat embellished ("I deduce, Miss Russell: Watson transforms") and, in the process, comes to understand herself rather better too.
The characters are true to canon, though I'm not keen on King's Watson, who is as bumbling and slow as any of the early film/TV adaptations that made him a comic foil for Holmes. Mrs Hudson is delightful. (And sharp.) And I can certainly extrapolate this Holmes -- ageing gracefully but in full command of his formidable skills, doing intelligence work for Mycroft, bored to distraction once the war's over and he's left without purpose -- from Arthur Conan Doyle's creation.
If I call this 'fan fiction' it's not in any derogatory sense. It takes canon, shares the author's knowledge, affection and joy therein with the reader -- who may well know more about Holmes than Mary Russell does, at least initially -- and uses that canon as the foundation of something new. I confess when I first heard of Mary Russell, I did pointedly enquire if her middle name was by any chance 'Sue': but Russell is a well-rounded individual in her own right, and though she is an excellent counterpart to Holmes, it's Russell herself rather than her mentor (or her relationship with him) who is the focus of this and subsequent novels.
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Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 08:03 am (UTC)I could not recognise Holmes or Watson, and I found Russell a blatant Mary Sue of the superwoman subspecies - I couldn't get beyond the third chapter. Not far enough, in fact, to encounter the bad research that others have recorded.
Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 09:34 am (UTC)Didn't think Russell was especially superwomanish, though. And no bad research has leapt out at me yet, though I'm not that familiar with the period or the milieu so would probably miss all but the most egregious mistakes.
Re: Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 09:42 am (UTC)Re: research. These are entertainment, not historical novels. I can forgive most things if they're not ludicrously blatant (which they'd have to be, given my complete lack of detailed historical knowledge of any period).
Re: Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 10:59 am (UTC)The Curious Case of the Currency
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 12:08 pm (UTC)Yvonne Rousseau assures us that the currency glitch singled out by Thog in A271 (one shilling, in 1915, equalling five pence) was fixed in a later edition: 'As for Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994): alterations can happen. Even before Ansible took notice, this novel's HarperCollins edition of 2000 describes Holmes (disguised as a gypsy) making up the shilling by which he has short-changed a stable-owner with (p.107) "ten pennies, a ha'penny and six farthings" – an alteration which indeed causes the coins to add up to a shilling. (http://news.ansible.co.uk/a272.html)
Yvonne Rousseau does have a point about dialogue though (the word 'fine' grates on me in Holmesian fiction, as does the phrase 'is all' -- I think 'that's all' would be more appropriately British).
Re: The Curious Case of the Currency
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 02:25 pm (UTC)Re: Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 02:31 pm (UTC)I dislike most historical novels precisely because:
a) few of the characters have an in-period mindset
and
b) there are, almost invariably, large historical errors that even I can spot.
The whole idea of these books is so totally out of character for Holmes and the heroine is so blatantly a self-insert that I would rather read good fan fiction. There isn't a lot of it of it for Holmes, but some is brilliant. Somewhere I have a link to a fanwork where the period between Holmes' "death" and his return in "The Empty House" is told by telegrams and train tickets and letters and other ephemera, all wonderfully in period and totally in character. That's entertaining.
Re: Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 02:48 pm (UTC)I read fan fiction as well ('Sub Rosa' -- if that's the one you meant -- is a work of genius, and there's some other good stuff out there amid the dross). On the other hand, it's sometimes nice to read an actual physical novel-length book.
Laurie King's books, I suspect, are hitting the same pleasure-centre in my brain that good fanfic stimulates. Though they're also hitting the 'hunting down books' pleasure-centre, and they are easier to read whilst lying in the sun!
Re: The Curious Case of the Currency
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 02:53 pm (UTC)Re: Our mileages vary!
Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2010 02:56 pm (UTC)Yes, indeed. If you can read while lying in the sun, which I can't. Sitting in the shade, maybe. I actually skim-read this at a friend's house, and I'd been reading her Elsie J Oxenham collection, so I can hardly go all LITERARY about this, but it's not my idea of a holiday or comfort-read either.