Issue 13: Grab Bag
Hey there!
A day late and discussing three very different stories, we give you Alex’s thoughts on the Mary Russel and Enola Holmes series, and Claudia’s celebration of the beautiful soul of Napoleon Dynamite. The connective tissues of this issue may stretch thin, but sometimes it’s enough to talk about good stories, what makes them good, and why we love them.
Alex on The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche
A lot of my love for Sherlock Holmes has come through adaptations—my first ever introduction to the character was in the Wishbone episode “The Slobbery Hound,” where Holmes is played by a talking Jack Russel terrier. So when I wished for more girls and women on Baker Street—characters who could work alongside Holmes, not as landladies or one-time rivals, but courageous detectives themselves—I turned to modern retellings. Some were bad, some were good, and some were transcendent.
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first book in Laurie R. King’s long-running Mary Russel series, and Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche, the seventh book in Nancy Springer’s long-running Enola Holmes series, are two of the transcendent ones.
In his poem “221B,” Vincent Starrett pays tribute to Holmes’ unchanging Victorian London: “Here, though the world explodes, these two survive / And it is always eighteen ninety-five.” But changelessness isn’t all that comforting when you’re a young woman struggling to make your way in a man’s world. Mary and Enola know this from experience; they’re both teenage heroines who work alongside Holmes and contend with a society much more hostile to their desires and talents. Through embracing either their similarities or differences to the Great Detective, Mary and Enola remake his world, and rework the Holmes canon into a nostalgic but modern mythology.
The treat of reading these books side-by-side is that they solve the impossibility of Holmes taking on a female partner in two different ways that have far-reaching implications for both Mary’s and Enola’s characterization, and the strengths and weaknesses of each series. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice begins in 1915, the middle of WWI, after Victorian conventions have already crumbled. Mary is well aware that “an alliance such as Holmes and I forged […] would have been unthinkable” in the detective’s heyday. Obviously it helps that she’s a genius always ready with a snappy comeback and often as arrogant as Holmes himself, but Mary is also too observant to chalk up their partnership completely to her own merits.
That being said, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is still very much a story about two exceptional people finding each other thanks to their own exceptionalism, with all the snags you’d expect. First and worst, it’s in the “Watson is an idiot” school of retellings. Mary usurps his role as Holmes’ most trusted sidekick quickly, even considering her superior deductive skills, and it’s never suggested that superior deductive skills might be a poor substitute for Watson’s warm humanity. Secondly and more forgivably, though Mary and Holmes do form a true partnership, it’s also an odd, all-consuming one, eventually “integrat[ing] all parts” of their personalities, interests, and lives. In the end, it comes down to personal taste, but Mary isn’t quite the Holmesian heroine I always hoped for, because she’s so similar to Holmes that the fact that she’s female is almost incidental.
Enola Holmes, the orphaned, feminist, much younger sister of Sherlock, doesn’t get off so easily. The Black Barouche is set in 1889, after Enola has already spent a year proving that she can solve mysteries and doesn’t need to be shipped off to finishing school. Since her brother’s incapable of seeing her as anything but female, Enola’s learned to use femininity to her advantage. Most of her cases involve other endangered women, and Enola solves them with the Holmes trademarks of deduction and disguise, plus insider’s knowledge. She knows a victim is alive since “things that a young lady […] needs once a month” are missing from the woman’s drawers. When Holmes accepts her help, the two make a quicker, more thorough investigation—more than deduction, Enola just knows what to look for.
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is a portrait of a close partnership; The Black Barouche is a celebration of Enola’s independence. After a game of cat-and-mouse stretching over the first six books, she and Sherlock are finally reconciled, able to work alongside each other and rely on their very different experiences and insights. And once the case is finished, Enola returns to her rooms at the professional women’s club, her friends, and her life. She loves her brother and loves solving mysteries with him, but she definitely doesn’t want complete integration. The Enola Holmes books lack the scope of the Mary Russel series, and their knotty emotional conflicts are sometimes lightly sketched, but they serve up a heroine more than capable of matching wits with Holmes who’s also separate from him, and invaluable because of her separateness.
This isn’t to say that Enola has the better series, or even that I prefer one series over the other. Whether their gender is irrelevant to their skills or intertwined with them, Mary and Enola both revitalize Holmes’ familiar world with a new pair of eyes. Under their watch, Baker Street didn’t explode—it grew, taking in new centuries, new stories, and a Sherlock Holmes who could stand to be helped by a modern woman. Which in its own way is just as comforting as a smoky flat on a dim street where it’s always 1895.
Claudia on Napoleon Dynamite
I might as well admit it at the beginning: this is going to be an essay about how Napoleon Dynamite makes me cry. Because, while it didn’t hit me as hard the first time I watched it in my early teens, now I can’t see the final fifteen minutes without feeling like I’m about to tear up. Yes, it’s goofy and absurd and a fountain of memes, and I love all of those things, but what I love most is how deeply it digs into the misery of teenagerhood. In the world of Napoleon Dynamite, adolescence is an off-kilter time filled with both oblivious and painfully self-aware awkwardness and ego that make you miserable and also a miserable person to be around.
Let’s start with Napoleon, who’s the heart and soul of the movie, questionable drawing skills, dubious perm, and all. There’s some sense that he may come from a broken family—his parents are never mentioned, and he and his older brother live with their grandmother—but it’s never delved into. He seems lonely, early on telling some bullies that he spent his summer “with my uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines,” but he’s also needlessly aggressive when anyone tries to connect with him, shouting at a kid on the bus and belittling a classmate’s photos and keychains when she comes to his house looking to earn money for college.
Whether these outbursts are motivated by fear or cluelessness is never really explored; Napoleon isn’t a protagonist given to self-reflection. I tend to think that it’s a bit of both, simply because that lines up with my own experience of early adolescence, where I longed for friendship but was convinced of my innate superiority to most of my peers and often struck with a pathological shyness that made reaching out or making conversation close to impossible.
This queasy sense of teenage ennui extends to the movie’s other characters, who are either teenagers themselves or are stuck in a juvenile limbo. Napoleon’s friends Deb and Pedro may be slightly less awkward than he is, but they’re hampered by their own struggles, whether that’s Deb’s shyness or Pedro’s uphill climb as the only immigrant in the mostly white high school. The adult characters are even worse—Napoleon’s grandmother, one of the few grounded characters in the film, breaks her tailbone early on, leaving him in the care of Kip, his thirty-something brother who “chat[s] online with babes all day” and his Uncle Rico who recently broke up with his girlfriend and is saving up to buy a time machine so he can travel back to his high school glory days.
These characters are looking for fulfillment they only half-heartedly pursue and (with the possible exception of Deb and Pedro) probably don’t deserve, and the miraculous thing is that they do find it. In one of his few unselfish acts in the movie, Napoleon does a dance for the skit portion of Pedro’s class president election speech, and instead of ridicule is met with a standing ovation. At this point, Napoleon Dynamite transitions from a quirky comedy to an ode to the grace of relationships. As a final montage runs, set to Patrick Street’s beautiful “Music for a Found Harmonium,” viewers see Kip leave town with his girlfriend, and Uncle Rico’s girlfriend return to him via bicycle with a look so tender, I feel warmer just having seen it. You could call this ending wish fulfillment—it is and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re lucky, that fulfillment can be an integral part of teenagerhood too—the love from parents, friends, and family that we may not earn but that lifts us out of ourselves and saves us.
Thanks a million for reading, and see you in May!
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia