Book vs. Book
A couple of years ago Mama bought me a book for Bogey Day. It was a new novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, written by someone who isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It wasn’t bad, but some liberties were taken with the character. The largest was actually the central motivator of the plot: Holmes had had an affair with a woman who featured in one of the original stories. She had been kidnapped by a gang of master criminals as part of a plot of some kind, and his famous reserve was slipping in the face of danger to her.
Now, I’m not saying that giving Holmes this motivation doesn’t add drama to the story, and of course it allows for examining an under-explored aspect of his character. But anybody who has read the original stories can tell you that Holmes had no interest in women. He considered them a danger to the organized functioning of his extraordinary mind. As Watson said of him in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (my favorite of the stories):
It was not that he felt any emotion kin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer-excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely-adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.
So when I read the more recent work my thought was, “Well, that just isn’t Sherlock Holmes. It’s a decent story, but that isn’t the Holmes I love.” But the more I thought about this, the sillier it seemed. Is the Holmes in this book the same as the Holmes in that one? What does that even mean? Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. There is no “real” Holmes. The question is intellectually interesting, perhaps, but ultimately pointless.
There’s an argument that’s been going on for centuries between Christians and Muslims, and it’s this: Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Well, it’s in the Koran, so I suppose that for Muslims it’s an article of faith, although there is some trouble over this in Malaysia right now. As far as Christians go, President Bush (“…whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, [they pray] to the same God”) thinks so. Ted Haggard, for one, begged to differ (“The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite.”). There are as many answers as there are Christians and I’m not going to list them all.
My answer, though, is the same as above. Is the God in this book the same as the God in that one? What does that even mean? The question is intellectually interesting, perhaps, but ultimately pointless.