Michael Chabon's manipulated final solution.

Kessler, Julia Braun

Joseph Conrad, himself a magnificent prose stylist, cautions us about how words can be the "great foes of reality." He worries that "when the world is but a place of many words" there comes a time when man can appear "a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot." And it is this phrase that seems especially prescient in considering Michael Chabon's latest novel, The Final Solution.

Despite the terrible revelations that shocked us at the end of World War II, the grim physical realities of the opening of .the concentration camps and the tales of forced, last-ditch and senseless death marches, what we witnessed for decades among survivors was a self-imposed silence about that ghastly high-tech barbarism that befouled the 20th century.

Only gradually did the reticence of the victims- give way to a letting go in a pouting forth of those sagas detailing horrendous events in book after book, of every variety and form from the early giants of testimony. Examples are--the hidden diaries of the girl Anne Frank, and the narratives of that rational Italian chemist, Primo Levi, and his documentation of those years through his periodic tables. We have subsequently been given the works of the great surviving Holocaust poets, masterful re-creations by its novelists, and have heard and re-heard the many, many commentators, historians and philosophers who meticulously analyzed the nature of its special attack on civilization per se. Painters have depicted scenes for us, musicians have composed their threnodies to lament the perished; even movie makers have taken their turn at documenting and/or re-creating those brutalities. To be sure, the shelves and shelves of recovered records, testimonies, and artistic representations will keep astonishing us just as long as any survivor continues to tell of that experience, adding another dossier to our archives.

So, if that aberration of our times remains today as incomprehensible as once it first appeared to us, it is hardly because in the attempt to decipher its causes the Holocaust hasn't been approached by every means and method known to the imagination! Each survivor, we have seen, has needed to address the unsleeping demons in a personal way, if there could be a hope of living with them.

Yet, inexorably, time continues to distance us from that bleak epoch, and as the years carry us forward, we see a new kind of reader emerging, one for whom that 20th century nightmare has become as remote as any other mass slaughter of the past. And this development has apparently carried us to a new place, one heretofore unexpected and unimagined in Holocaust literature.

Here and now, it seems, not only can we dare to approach the unthinkable realms of the subject, but also we can discuss them as smoothly in terms of any banal social exchange! More, we can even presume upon it as just one other tragic circumstance among history's many disasters.

Michael Chabon is a young writer, already lauded for his work. He shows little hesitation in making use of those events according to his own lights, and for contemporary novelistic designs. Thus, in his new work, despite its most provocative title, the Holocaust itself is barely touched upon in the action, let alone dwelt upon, before it is promptly dismissed. History remains as peripheral to the plot of The Final Solution as any other of the fictional inventions to be found within its pages

True, a key character in the tale is a nine-year old German boy who miraculously escaped the Nazi murder machine. It is also true that this mute child, Linus Steinman and his extraordinary pet, an African gray parrot, might be implicated in certain spy operations, his talking bird acting as courier for an SS code; but as Chabon makes apparent from the start, his novel is concerned with far more than the plight of a little boy. In fact, what the author has built around him is an elegantly conceived detective yarn filled with all the paraphernalia associated with that genre.

With Chabon's introduction into the plot of an elderly gentleman, now in retirement in the depths of Sussex's Downs after a long career as a famous sleuth, we can discern the author's true ambition for this novel. The irritable 89-year old, who is busily engaged in reading his British Bee Journal when disturbed by the child, Linus, outside his window, is meant as a take-off on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It reminds us a bit too obviously of that legendary character and of Dr. Watson's tales of "wild, famous leaps of induction," of "assassins inferred from cigar ash," or "horse thieves from the absence of a watchdog's bark."

But this old yet "new" Holmes is the genius one might have expected to encounter in his dotage. And we watch him here shuffling about among the less than canny locals of that region to crack a case. Tongue in cheek, Chabon trots out a roster of the "usual suspects" scattered through those once splendid, now dilapidated English country houses in Sussex. Chabon shoves him through the genre's obligatory maze, complete with a murder victim, a kidnapping (that is, of Bruno, the genius parrot), a chase to London, and even a satisfyingly "happy," if perplexing, conclusion. English stereotypes abound; we meet them in the course of this romp--the inexperienced local Detective Inspector Bellows (who has called in the Holmes-like detective to help him), his older and more skeptical colleague, D.C. Quint, the misplaced Maylayee black vicar Mr. Panicker and his upright, landlady wife, their hopelessly sullen and wayward son, Reggie, along with a motley crew of house boarders who are broadly satirized and fancifully drawn by a skilled stylist. Chabon shows himself versed in their ticks, their phrases, and their habits, even to "their blackthorn sticks or morning tramps across the Downs." Here's his take on the beekeeping ancient shamus: "Even on a sultry afternoon like this one when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter-- newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers. Bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs--that made treacherous the crossing of his parlor, and open his front door to the world. Indeed the daunting prospect of the journey from armchair to doorstep was among the reasons for his lack of commerce with the world...."

A Pulitzer prize-winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), Chabon tried out the same gambit--Holocaust refugee as starting point--to give us a pair of misfits who manage to recreate themselves as supermen! When he developed Joe Kavalier, a young escape artist/magician as capable of smuggling himself out of Hitler's dominated Prague in 1939 and into the arms of his Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay, another kind of mischievous cat altogether, the pair fantasized their American comic book heroes and with their help triumphed. Then, as now, what we were looking at is the Holocaust exploited as plot device, and nothing more,

Which takes us right back to Conrad's fear of words' distancing reality. Certainly Chabon's latest title presents us with something like a dare, when you consider that his final solution turns out to be the solving of a murder! And perhaps he demonstrates for us just how well he has succeeded in "moving on." He manages to combine complex structure, "mannered" style, and fanciful slights of imagination. Given his wit, range, brisk characterization, he carries it off well enough one turns his pages.

Indeed, Chabon's assessment of where we stand literarily may be accurate. Nevertheless, for those of us who lived through those trying times, 60 years have neither blurred nor dimmed, nor yet staled the images of memory, nor silenced the faint and ever-present cries of the lost, who still hover about us. As the poet Paul Celan says of the perished souls who continue without hint of any resting place: "In the air, that's where your roots are, over there in the air!"

Now, there's a verse to strike at the heart; yet young Chabon's generation of writers seems oblivious to all such spirits in pain. And that's enough to stop one cold.

The Final Solution; A story of Detection by Michael Chabon, New York: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, 2004, 131 pp., $16.95

JULIA BRAUN KESSLER is a journalist and novelist. Her last piece in Midstream "Being Them: A New York City Childhood" appeared in September/October of 2004.