REVIEW: The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl
I’m a great fan of Edgar Allan Poe. Few writers can match the mental acuity he exhibits in his short stories. That cunning skill by which he cloaks his scorn of society’s malignant ways then reveals it, flashing, at the tail-end of a whip. His boldness to dive into mysteries– to dark depths– diving, as it were, with me into my own dark heart. His puzzles, challenging the reader to see that what seems is not what is. His obsession with the push and pull of Beauty and Terror– that quality which earlier, wiser generations of writers referred to as the Sublime. He teases me endlessly to undo the fringes of my imagination, and delivers that feeling of Dread associated with the Divine which is often missing from the works of contemporary authors. Who can match the cloud of enigma to which Edgar Allan Poe draws us? Add to this the baffling circumstances of his death (discovered unconscious in a dark corner of a Baltimore pub when he should have been miles away in Virginia; haphazardly dressed in clothes that did not fit him) which made him look like a character in his own story– and the Author himself ascends to Mystery-hood. In his dying hour, the grand master Edgar Allan Poe left his fans a puzzle to which he must eternally hold the key. A going-away gift to his loving readers perhaps.
It is into this mystery that Matthew Pearl dips his nimble mind. In his book, The Poe Shadow, Pearl asks us to imagine Quentin, a young Baltimore lawyer, possessing more of the poetic nature than a solicitor's, who suddenly realizes that the queer burial he witnessed one night was that of his favourite author Edgar Poe. Convinced that Poe should be celebrated more by the ignorant American public who despised his morbid stories, Quentin risks his reputation as a responsible, level-headed law partner in order to investigate Poe's death. Quentin leaves his fiance and his practice to travel to Paris in search of the real man who was the basis for Poe's greatest creation: the literary grandfather of Sherlock Holmes, Auguste Dupin. The only person in the world, Quentin believes, who can solve the mystery of Poe's death. However, he meets not one man, but two. And in the clash of techniques between the two Dupins, the reader, as well as Quentin, is forced to struggle with the possibility that Poe might have just truly conjured up Dupin out of the fog in his brain.
Matthew Pearl not only gives us an action-packed mystery, a story which fans would love, but truly an interpretation of the facts as they came to light in his research. The dates and places in the novel, as they relate to Poe, are all factual. Persons who were there at the time of Poe's death were also brought into the drama by Pearl, some given new names. The novel is essentially Pearl's thesis on the death of Poe. And his theory, in the tradition of Dupin, is unbelievably, impressively simple.
