Collins: The Trickster

I will just say that this book has been interesting to read because it is a different set up from the usual American mystery novels.  There are so many pieces to the puzzle of a mystery and I have always had a hard time figuring out who was the perpetrator and who had just been wrongly accused because of being at the wrong place at the right time.  However, within this mystery it seemed to me so close to factual that I had a difficult time reminding myself that it is supposed to be fiction.  So it is my focus, not on a single or group of characters, but a focus on the author.  Collins seemed to know exactly what he was doing when he puts certain things in and keeping certain things out so that the reader must make their own interpretation.  He establishes the reader as both judge and detective.   The way he made it difficult for me was when he includes so many artifacts that are normally used to show facts like a compilation of letters, reports, newspaper clippings, notes, wills, several journal entries and even a receipt.  Franklin Blake organizes and submits as much evidence to his family as he can, while Collins, is thus submitting it to us as the reader/detective.  It seems as though that Collins is testing our own judgment and morals.  The reader is asked to evaluate not just a theft from an estate in England, but its earlier theft from a sacred Hindu shrine.  As the John Herncastle is the presumed thief in the legally sanctioned robbery of India by the British government.  But of course, I would hope others feel that the theft to the nation is a bigger injustice than the theft to the family because what is truly on trial in this novel is personal and national responsibility of those nations that choose to invade other nations.  The same is true about our country today as we may invade other areas that they must keep responsibility for all personal actions. 

The most difficult part for me was the beginning of the story because it seemed to only come from a small piece of a family document describing the events that took place in India.  It seems to open as the prologue and then as Franklin Blake wants to tell the story, but he decides to have Gabriel Betteredge write it out for him.  So the words are Blake’s, which I think you can hear, but as the events unfold it still feels like they are all from a distance.  Not only with Blake’s, but the rest of the novel it is interesting how the entire mystery intertwines personal interactions with political, then the private with the public, then the past with the present and finally gives the fiction a feeling of fact.  The problem really seemed to arise for me when the novel skipped around with narrators as it seemed to wrench the authority away from the typical first-person narrator.  This collection of contrasting voices serves Collins as both his evidence and possible archive to throw off the reader.    

Some of the other things that threw me off as the reader/detective were the thought of the curse.  I am not one to say that I would let an idea of a curse rule my life, but I will say that I am superstitious and feel that other powers in the world do exist.  So as a reader/detective I had a difficult time setting my superstitions to the side and think of the situation rationally.  The idea that had escaped me until I headed toward the end of the novel is just as I mentioned in the beginning that it was probably not a curse on the family, but on the nation.  In my mind the empire, not the moonstone, was the curse and the real problem.  The novel focuses on the spoils that the empire receives while the nation is overreaching its own authority over other nations.  I guess I could see the family history representing a nation’s history as each one tries to cover up any type of thieving or murderous act in the pursuit to preserve or protect itself.

So as the reader/detective that Collins had made me into, I had difficult time remembering that it was just a story.  Even though if we all were to look at it as I have in the previous paragraphs the story has many applications for many nations of today including our own