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. 

Exploring the Conscience of Art

The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape

I was waiting for Barnes’ new novel for a while now after the Man Booker winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. This new novel explores the conscience of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich through an intimate third person narrator who meets him at three crucial moments of his life- as a man awaiting the repercussions of a dictator in the beginning, an ambassador of the same regime to world in the second and the torn lonely artist making his private tribulations into music praying that death liberates his art from life in the final moment. What interested me was the way we wind up with Shostakovich as he is thinking to himself what it means to be him, an artist, a Russian, a man hounded by power in public and art in private. We see with him how it all began on the wrong note for him with his name a mere echo of his father and how he shuffled through his life into the inevitable tragedy of betrayal that life set up.

We are faced with two impossible choices- to be honest, brave and dead or to be deceptive, fearful and alive. That is the kind of duality with no middle ground when power of that kind as we found in Stalinist Russia pervades life. There is no meaning to freedom and all roads lead to deception. Shostakovich’s encounters with Soviet tutors are some of the best parts of the book. They are sent to be patient with the genius, deliberately working through his stubborn mind ridden with guilt of living with such uncompromising vicissitudes. How the first tutor of the Stalinist world teaches him to begin with obeisance through remembering what it means to be part of history by teaching it to oneself. And how the last tutor encourages him to forget the past when he has barely begun to forgive. Caught between memory and forgetting, courage and cowardice, life and death, Shostakovich drowns the noise of time with music.

The larger questions we are posed with are who does art belong to? And how do you speak truth to power? Art belongs to everybody and nobody at the same time. As Shostakovich reminisces the posterity is free to do what it wants with his art, his music. It is both theirs to judge and not theirs to understand. That is because the truth in art stands all time while the truth in life is dealt with in small measures till it resembles no truth at all. With these interesting questions to explore, I found the novel intimate and interesting.