Category Archives: 2016 Books

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

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“I address these lines — written in India — to my relatives in England.”

The Moonstone …….. a yellow diamond, sacred to the Indian people, guarded over by an ancient curse and three Brahmins devoted to its preservation. Yet the revered diamond is stolen.  Time passes, and the Moonstone ends up in the hands of Colonel Hearncastle who returns to England with the ill-fated gem. Angry at the relatives who shun his advances, he leaves the Moonstone in his will to his niece, Rachel Verinder.  Did the Colonel leave the stone as a profitable legacy, or was it intended to wreak destruction on those who had earlier rejected his gruff overtures?

Rachel’s cousin, Franklin Blake, arrives with the diamond, which is to be bestowed on her during her eighteenth birthday party at her mother’s Yorkshire estate. However, there are already disturbing echoes of disruption within the family home.  A housemaid, Rosanna Spearman, a reformed thief, appears both agitated and love-stricken, exhibiting suspicious behaviour, and three Indian jugglers are spotted in town.  The culmination of these oddities result in the diamond disappearing the night it is given to Rachel.  Who perpetrated the theft?  Why is Rachel behaving with a reckless and stubborn agitation? Rosanna’s death further complicates the situation and finally Sergeant Cuff, a respected policemen from London is called in to solve the mystery.

source Wikipedia

Considered one of the first detective novels, The Moonstone was bathed in a shower of critical acclaim.  T.S. Eliot claimed that it was “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Wilkie Collins and not by Poe.”  Dorothy Sayers, writer of the Peter Wimsey mysteries, hailed it as “probably the very finest detective novel ever written,” and G.K. Chesterton, creator of the detective Father Brown, declared it “the best detective tale in the world.”  Collins himself was attempting an inversion of his earlier novel of suspense, The Woman In White, where he designed the circumstances to affect the characters of the novel.  With The Moonstone, Collins chose to turn that premise on its head and investigate how different characters influence their circumstances.  The characters are sometimes wrong and at other times right in their perceptions, but nevertheless each works to shape the outcome of a situation.  This psychological experiment was a brilliant invention of Collins, adding more mystery and suspense to a story already ripe with uncertainty.

Luckily, I chose to read this one on vacation over the Christmas holidays and was able to fly through it in 2 days with it glued to my hands.  I could hardly put it down, a tribute to Collins’ powerful and cryptic narrative.  The story is a wee bit sensational but being a detective novel, I don’t think it affected the story in a negative way.  The characters are all well delineated (except one is rather overdone; I’ll leave you to guess which one) and the method of presenting the novel in an epistolary style is again, an unusual but effective technique. Collins’ The Moonstone was a great way to start off a year of reading!

The Persians by Aeschylus

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“Of the Persians gone 
To the land of Greece
Here are the trusted:
As protectors of treasure …..”

 

Performed in Athens in  472 B.C., The Persians portrays the naval battle at Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians, which occurred seven years earlier.   It is unique from other tragedies, as it was without a prologue or exudos (final scene) of the chorus.  As it deals with contemporary history instead of the common mythic topics, it was not part of a unified triad of plays that Aeschylus appeared to favour, yet interestingly it was performed with two other “lost” mythic plays, Phineus and Glaucus Ponieus.  In comparing this play to later tragedies, these differences raise the possibility of tragedy developing out of an earlier form.

Battle of Salamis (1868)
Wilhelm von Kaulbach
source Wikimedia Commons
 
The play begins in 480 B.C., and at the palace of Xerxes at Sousa, the Persian elders are lauding the strength of Xerxes and his army as they are engaged in battle with the Greeks:
 

“And the furious leader the herd
Of populous Asia he drives,
Wonderful over the earth,
And admirals stern and rough
Marshals of men he trusts:
Gold his descent from Perseus,
He is the equal of god.”
 

Yet their tone of exhortation becomes tinged with concern over the question of victory in this battle, and the mother of Xerxes, the Queen, appearing, echoes their sentiments.  A herald arrives, bringing most unwelcome news:
 

“O cities of Asia, O Persian land,
And wealth’s great anchorage!
How at a single stroke prosperity’s
Corrupted, and the flower of Persia falls,
And is gone.  Alas!  the first herald of woe,
He must disclose entire what befell:
Persians, all the barbarian host is gone.”
 

The herald, an eyewitness, bitterly describes the Persians’ defeat at Salamis.  Momentarily speechless, the Queen finally asks about survivors.  Xerxes is still living, but the Herald lists the many dead heroes, casualties of the battle.  The survivors are scattered.

 

“Ship dashed against ship, till the Persian army
dead stewed the deep like flowers”
source Wikimedia Commons
While Xerxes is a great warrior, his errors in the battle are made apparent.  He harangued his captains publicly, “in ignorance of Greek guile and the jealousy of the gods” …. and, “he conned the future ill.”  In return for his pride and miscalculations:

 

“All the Persians, who were in nature’s prime,
Excellent in soul, and nobly bred to grandeur,
Always first in trust, met their death
In infamy, dishonor, and in ugliness.”

 

Lamenting that her dream of defeat has come to fruition, the Queen attempts to assuage her grief by offering prayers and gifts to the gods.  As she offers libations at the tomb of her dead husband, Darius, his ghost rises up, inquiring about the present woe.  When he hears of the tragic defeat, he appears to blame his son’s “youthful pride”, yet he counsels the Queen to receive her son gently when he returns.
 
Somber laments issue from the Persian council of elders until Xerxes arrives in grievous affliction.  He recounts more of his defeat, his words a song of sorrow until the end:
 
“Oh alas, woe,
The magic wheel of longing for my friends you turn, you tell
Me hateful sorrows.  Within my frame my heart resounds,

resounds ……”

Death of the Persian admiral (Ariabignes,
brother of Xerxes) early in the battle
source Wikipedia
Wow, this was a very powerful play.  By the Persians’ defeat, Xerxes has not only lost honour for himself, but he is responsible for the loss of honour of generations before him.  Yet the tragedy of the situation is in his overweening pride and his attempt to place himself in a position above the gods.  He ignored the wisdom of his elders, instead choosing to go his own way, and paid dearly for his folly.

 

Even though, Aeschylus was writing through Persians eyes, elements of a Greek mindset crept in here and there, as in Darius’ horror of the Persians plundering and burning the Greek temples.  And he counsels the Queen for the Persians not to invade Greece because “the Grecian soil is their own ally.”  Very convenient.  Yet there is also a sympathetic tone towards the Persians, as if the Greeks can empathize with the sufferings of battle and the woes of the aftermath of loss.  In fact, the sympathy is startling.  The great daring of such a play perhaps goes beyond both historical and contemporary understanding.  No playwright had risked presenting the enemy, not only from a sympathetic viewpoint, but also showing them as noble and heroic in battle.  The battle at Salamis was a recent event and it is a tribute to the rhetoric of Aeschylus that this play was so well-regarded.  Yet while his feat is indeed admirable, Aeschylus ensures that he remains in control of his creation.  Few names can be traced to real persons, hyperbole is employed and Persians adopt Greek tradition, preventing any person from drawing any concrete truth from his presentation.  His Persian War, while being historically based, is still in the realm of myth, as if he cannot escape it. 

Translated by Seth G. Bernardete