Mysteries! Conspiracies! The return of Irene Adler! The Great Detective in lethal confrontations with hoodlums!
Welcome to Sherlock Holmes’ greatest adventure!
Author Dan Simmons has impressed me greatly with two of his previous books. The Terror, a historical fiction about two ships lost in the Arctic and stalked by a monstrous entity, and Summer of Night, an amazing horror story about a group of kids fighting an ancient evil that it vying to control their town. Both are imaginative, suspenseful, with wonderful characters. Two unforgettable tour de forces. And yet, The Fifth Heart probably beats both books.
The year is 1893, the place is Paris, and writer Henry James, known at the time for novels such as Daisy Miller and considered one of the most prominent authors of his time, is deeply depressed and planning to take his life by diving from a bridge. It is when he meets a man he had become acquainted with in London with some time ago, the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is on his “great hiatus”, the period where the whole world believes he died at the Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland, after a mortal strugle with the elusive Prof. Moriarty. Since then, Holmes is traveling the world under the guise of a Norwegian explorer called Sigerson and only by chance he stumbles on James.
If you are paying attention, you may be asking yourself how it is possible for a real person, like Henry James, lives in the same world as a character from fiction, as Holmes. And that is one of the main plot points here, because Holmes tells James that he has come to believe he is not a real person, but a fictional construct. The main reasons being the high amount of incongruences all around him, like when John Watson, his faithful companion, is called erroneously “James” here or there, the fact that Watson’s wounds magically seem to change places sometimes (today on his knee, tomorrow on his arm and so on) and the multiple wives of Watson, that suspiciously appear from nowhere.
But what about the main plot here? There are two, actually. Holmes asks James to go with him to America and help investigate the unusual death of Clover Adams, a friend of James, some years ago. Although her death, that took place in 1885, was considered a suicide, each year since them, on the anniversary of the demise, the other members of their small group of friends, called the Five Hearts (hence the title, receive a letter by mail insinuating that the death was not a suicide.
But it is not just that. Because there is another reason Holmes is going to the United States. He is in the service of the British Secret Service and his brother, Mycroft, to stop a assassination atempt on the life of the American president, Grover Cleveland, and put the kibosh on a conspiracy to start global chaos. A plan that involves Irene Adler, arguably the only woman in which Holmes was ever romantically interested in, the infamous legacy of Moriarty and some terrible mistakes from Holmes past, one of which almost caused his death in Tibet.
It is easy to see that this long novel is a love letter to Henry James and to the immortal creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is perfectly clear that Simmons has deep knowledge of his two subjects. Also, the plot is full of many other figures taken from History, as writer Mark Twain, future American president Theodore Roosevelt and the friends and family of Clover Adams, herself also real.
Maybe it is not a work for every reader. At 600 pages (and a small font), The Fifth Heart is a book of slow development, with no little character exposition. But it is also a book that rewards readers with a sprawling saga of suspense, terrible secrets, action, mystery and friendship that positions Holmes as, for lack of a better term, a very badass hero, capable of playing dirty to take care of some violent criminals the surronds him at one point or another.
Maybe the best literary pastiche starring Holmes, among the hundreds that exist in print. An unforgettable adventure for any fan of the character.
The Fifth Heart (2015, Back Bay Books)
By Dan Simmons
618 pages
Rating: 10 nerds (of 10) 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎
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