The Historian as the Detective

"It often seems to me that all detective work is wiping your false starts and beginning again.”
         -Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

Over the century, the detective has managed to remain in his carapace, intact in idiosyncrasy. She may have gained a savoir faire of a new time, harbour new skills or exhibit stranger eccentricities. But her functional personality that houses- a keen sense of the narrative, the estimation and exploration of human nature, the unravelling of the story one layer at a time- remains intact. The acquired expertise to compete with conflicting narratives posed by the antagonist, knowledge of exacting depth and constant tendency to be an outsider make her both intriguing as story teller and endearing. So too is the reluctant but tenacious historian who peels off layers of a plot by the sheer tenderness of his labour and tenacity of pursuit. And this is what Siddhartha Mukherjee does by retelling intimate histories of maladies and human endeavours.

He has come upon us as a medical historian, the elusive counterpart of lawyer detective- the pugnacious logician and police hunter combined. His method is laborious as much as exacting like his choice of subject. He prefers intimate histories, counting each day of the story, taking tours and detours, chasing red herrings and stumbling upon the truth almost as an aside to the story. Both in his The Emperor of all Maladies and The Gene, this sense of serendipity that makes us party of stunning chance encounters and the weight of history that is laid with care on the reader’s purview makes it breathtaking and evocative. The duality of lightness and burden, accidents and intentions, mutations and inheritance, loss and gain also renders the stories he tells with a human voice. This voice is capable of being in awe at the endurance of human endeavours and quail in terror at the vicissitudes of life. We are witness to a battle of man v life, human v metastasis and inheritors v ancestors.

The detected soon assumes a compelling role as the narrator, exhibiting the fallacies of the original detective, man. The ever truant cancer cells multiply in utter defiance of the laws that govern the biological world; the genes bury their secrets in reams of junk letters and codes. It seems that anything worth investing has this truancy of its own that refuses to be captured in a single human story.

Therefore, the story that Siddhartha Mukherjee painstakingly narrates is many stories folded into one book, it has as many truths as there are readers. It divides and combines the vantage points, always shifting, always transient to make the victor vanquished and the dead alive. His narrations are magnificent and compellingly human- the protagonists are everyday heroes, housed in the everydayness of their work and life except that one fine day they were called to witness some miracle and were easily compelled to embark on a journey to understand it.

As in his The Emperor of  all Maladies, a biography of cancer, he repeats the same tenor and vigour with The Gene, an intimate history of man. Here’s a historian turned detective, who remarkably solves one case and leaves open many questions difficult to answer.