1. A young boy, a retired de-
tective / beekeeper, and
the Holocaust play
key roles in “The Final
Solution” by Michael
Chabon, above.
By Carlo Wolff Special to The Denver Post
T
he Final Solution,” Michael Chabon’s first
work of adult fiction since his 2001 Pu-
litzer Prize-winning “The Amazing Adven-
tures of Kavalier and Clay,” again deals in
ready-mades. Where “Kavalier and Clay”
mined comics and pulp fiction, “The Final
Solution” updates Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes stories. Like Matthew Pearl’s post-modern 2003
novel “The Dante Club,” a conflation of Dante Alighieri
and a 19th-century Boston literary soci-
ety, “The Final Solution” conflates a
Holmes-like figure and a Holo-
caust-based puzzle to shed fresh light
on earlier, disquieting times.
Chabon’s hero is an 89-year-old detec-
tive who, when this graceful tale begins
in July 1944, has been retired for 30
years. He keeps bees, as did Holmes
when Conan Doyle “retired” him. This
old man doesn’t suffer fools gladly and
doesn’t want to do much work, detec-
tive or otherwise.
He is stirred to action, however, by a
perplexing murder involving a rare and
oddly eloquent parrot, a seemingly
mute German Jewish boy who is a Holo-
caust refugee, a rural vicar and his wife
and their peculiar, secretive lodgers.
Chabon invests the old man with singular grace and full-
ness, contrasting him with Linus Steinman, the
9-year-old whose parrot, Bruno, is the novella’s object
of desire. Here, in his aviary, the old man helps stung,
sorry Linus — and tries to resolve warring parts of him-
self:
“ ‘Mustn’t yank them out,’ he told the boy with a sharp-
ness he did not entirely intend. He was aware of the ex-
istence of a vocabulary for the consolation of sorrowing
children, but it was one he had never troubled to learn.
Boys had served him well over the years — but that was
in another century! — extending the reach of his eyes
and ears, passing invisibly into dark lanes and court-
> See CHABON on 13F
By Steve Weinberg
Special to The Denver Post
Given all the complicated
electronic and motorized ob-
jects (including automobiles)
owned by almost every U.S.
household, the bicycle seems
unsophisticated — down-
right retro. So it might come
as a surprise to learn that de-
signing a practical bicycle
took great minds hundreds of
years, and that the homely re-
sult did not begin to revolu-
tionize transportation in the
United States until the 1890s,
barely beating the gasoline-pow-
ered Model T Ford to market.
Because Americans, and citi-
zens of many other nations,
chose motorized, polluting
speed over the slower, nonpol-
luting alternative, many poten-
tial readers of “Bicycle: The His-
tory” have never fallen in love
with two-wheeled human-pow-
ered transport, or fell out of
love long ago.
Being a lifelong bicyclist — I
have used a succession of them
as my primary means of trans-
portation for 50 years — I har-
bor a bias in favor of a book that
glorifies the subject. And glorify
bicycles David V. Herlihy does.
That is unsurprising, given Her-
lihy’s intense affair with bicy-
cling since his teenage years,
which coincided with the impor-
tation of European 10-speeds
into the United States. Later, he
lived in Italy, where he rode a
high-quality racing bike.
Still, this is a book that should
fascinate any reader who cares
about well-researched, well-
written, beautifully illustrated
history, especially the history of
> See BICYCLE on 13F
A dazzling glorification of the bicycle
By William Porter
Denver Post Staff Writer
Henry Smart isn’t the first immi-
grant to disembark on Ellis Island,
but he’s likely the first to toss his
forged passport into the Atlantic
and bound into New York City
with a leg up on 95 percent of the
natives.
Sheer Emerald Isle élan has al-
ready served the young man well,
albeit for dark purposes.
For Smart is just that, and fans of
Roddy Doyle, his creator, will re-
member him fondly — if cautious-
ly — from 1999’s “A Star Called
Henry.” Now he’s back in “Oh,
Play That Thing,” Ireland burned
behind him.
It’s the second
novel in “The
Last Roundup,”
Doyle’s planned
trilogy spanning
Ireland and
America. At 46,
the Dublin au-
thor aspires to de-
liver a chronicle
of the American
century’s birth,
as seen through
one Irish round-
er’s eyes.
It is also
Doyle’s grasp at
grandeur, in sub-
ject and voice,
and one largely
realized.
The book opens in the
mid-1920s. Henry, a former Irish
Republican Army assassin, is on
the lam.
As his ship steams into New
York harbor, Henry, surrounded
by the teeming masses yet apart
from them, stares at the great cop-
per lady and the growing wall of
skyscrapers before him. “I was the
only man alone, the only man not
afraid of what was growing up in
front of us,” he says. “This was
where a man could disappear,
could die if he wanted to, and
come back to quick, big life. I had
arrived.”
Henry has need of disappearing.
He’s on the run from his former
IRA paymasters. He has killed for
them; now they want him dead, his
folk-hero status notwithstanding.
By the time this boy-man arrives
in America, he has been on the run
for two years.
Henry sets to work making mon-
ey, using his wits, strapping good
looks and prodigious gift for gab.
He works the docks, launches a
sandwich-board crew and finds a
gift for marketing that Madison Av-
enue would admire.
“I’d just sold a repackaged cake
of soap to a hophead with no mon-
ey,” he marvels. “I’d passed my
own test.”
Money finds its way into his
pockets, and he falls in with a
woman whose skills at the grift ex-
ceed even his own. When his ene-
mies get wind of his new life, he
hops a freight train to Chicago.
There he discovers jazz and a ris-
ing musician named Louis Arm-
strong. The horn player takes to
Henry. Armstrong pays the way,
and Henry serves as buffer be-
tween the jazzman and the white
world.
But the job has its limits, the
past is closing in again, and Henry
is soon off on the rails with Dust
Bowl denizens.
Shot through all of this is a mix
of Irish slang and Depression-era
vernacular. Henry just can’t shut
> See DOYLE on 14F
FICTION
Bicycle
The History
By David V.
Herlihy
Yale University
Press, 470
pages, $35
The Final
Solution
A Story of
Detection
By Michael
Chabon
Fourth Estate,
131 pages,
$23.95
BOOKS
NONFICTION
Doyle’s
Smart
follow-up
Irish rogue flourishes
in ’20s America boom
FICTION
The Raleigh
Chopper
was in com-
petition for
market
share with
the
Schwinn
Sting-Ray
in the early
1970s.
Oh, Play
That Thing!
Volume Two of
"The Last
Roundup"
By Roddy
Doyle
Viking, 378
pages, $24.95
Sunday, December 5, 2004 g The Denver Post 11F