The Fifth Heart: A Novel by Dan Simmons

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fifth Heart: A Novel by Dan Simmons Tom Ue Dan Simmons. The Fifth Heart: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2015. 618 pp. $28.00 (Hardback). “One must wonder . . . what two writers of such major accomplishment and diverse talents would discuss in the starlight or moonlight. The nature of evil? The past and future of the black race of America? Thoughts on literature or dramaturgy?” (231). Henry James’s questions are directed to Mark Twain, who recalls the meetings that he had with his neighbor, friend, and fellow writer Harriet Beecher Stowe in the gazebo between their houses in Hartford. One of the central points of interest of Dan Simmons’s The Fifth Heart lies in such meetings. Twain will elaborate to James, William Dean Howells, and Sherlock Holmes that he would “swap yarns [with Stowe] and discuss the inevitable decline of Western Civilization” (230). On sleepless nights and prior to her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe’s death in 1886, they spoke mainly of their ailments, “She’d tell me hers; I’d tell ’er mine” (231). Did the conversations between Twain and Stowe take place as the former remembers or describes them? James isn’t sure: “James had read that the old lady, in her 80’s, was almost an invalid now. And no longer interested in life or ideas since her husband had died” (248). Other questions beckon: Is Twain being reticent? How does his relationship with his audience (i.e., James, Howells, and Holmes) affect his story? The Fifth Heart opens in Paris in March 1893. Simmons’s James is planning to throw himself into the Seine. His precise reasons are unclear, but the narrator cites a number of possibilities including his sister Alice’s death (6 March 1892), the poor sales of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (1886), an attack of gout (winter 1892–93), his upcoming 50th birthday, and what Adrian Poole calls a “five-year assault on the theatre [1890–95], which includes [a] dramatization of The American and culminates in [a] disastrous first night of Guy Domville (January, 1895)” (164). [End Page 314] James interrupts and is in turn interrupted by Holmes, who, convinced that he is a fictional creation, plans similarly to terminate his life: “I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character” (18). Simmons’s story fits neatly into the missing years in Holmesian chronology: readers of the canon will recall how Holmes and Moriarty fall into Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893), which is set in 1891, and that the detective resurfaces in 1894 in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903): the intervening outing, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02), is set before both cases, in 1889. Holmes pressures the very reluctant James into traveling with him to the U.S. to investigate the death of James’s old friend Clover Adams. Clover was in deep mourning following her father’s death, and on 6 December 1885 she had fatally consumed some of the potion that she used for developing photographs. In 1891, Clover’s brother Ned had visited Holmes regarding a white card that he, and the surviving members of the exclusive Five of Hearts community, received every 6 December since the first anniversary of her death: the card, embossed with a white rectangle, had five hearts at the top, four of which were colored blue, and it carried the typed words “She was murdered.” Ned, in the novel, died before Holmes could get to the case. The detective seeks the writer’s help not with replacing Watson as his Boswell but with providing introductions and cultural interpretation. Holmes reasons: [F]rom what they tell me, your rendering of the most exciting adventures you and I might have in America would end up with a beautiful young lady from America as the protagonist, various lords and ladies wandering through, verbal opaqueness followed by descriptive obtuseness, and nothing more exciting being allowed to occur in the tale than a verbal faux pas or tea service being late. (26) Holmes is clearly wrong: his knowledge of James is, after...