Who killed Edgar Poe?

 

In this novel Matthew Pearl sets out, ostensibly, to solve one of the great mysteries of world literature: the death of Edgar Allan Poe, who died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in 1849. From alcoholism to rabies, from brain fever to being a victim of cooping — a peculiar practice in Baltimore elections in which people were abducted, beaten up and forcibly made to cast fake votes in favour of a particular candidate — several theories have been put forth to explain the inexplicable. Pearl weaves all of these into his mystery novel only to leave us at the end with the same questions with which the book began: What was the cause of Poe’s death? Why was he lying in delirium on the streets of Baltimore in clothes that were not his? To whom did the Malacca cane that he was carrying when he was found on the streets belong? What is the identity of the man “Reynolds” whom Poe kept calling out to in his last moments? The book offers two different theories of what could have happened. Take your pick, says Pearl.

 

The protagonist of the novel, Quentin Clark, is a Poe enthusiast. He believes that if he can find the man who inspired the character of Monsieur C Auguste Dupin, the famous detective created by Poe, then the mystery of Poe’s death could be solved. In the course of his struggle to find the man who was the inspiration for Dupin, Quentin comes to realise that finding the right man is as difficult as finding the “truth” behind Poe’s death.

 

Quentin’s quest leads him to Paris, where he finds Dupont. Quentin is convinced that Dupont is the man who inspired the character of Poe’s detective. As Quentin, along with Dupont, is painstakingly trying to reconstruct the last few days of Poe’s life, enter Baron Dupin, another character, who claims that he is the true inspiration behind the fictional detective.

 

At each step, the ruffian Baron Dupin and his sidekick, the beautiful Bonjour thwart Quentin and Dupont’s efforts to find the truth. Gradually, the story of Poe’s death also becomes the story of finding out who is the true inspiration for Poe’s fictional detective, Dupin  — Dupont or Baron Dupin.

 

In accumulating a vast amount of information about Poe and the way he spent his last days, and in his mad search for Dupont-Dupin, Quentin slowly loses touch with the real world, so much so that he is made to give up his job, and loses his fiancée too, in the bargain. Quentin’s search and his sacrifices are in vain, for his facts do not lead, as he hopes they will, to the truth. Instead, in a macabre twist to the tale, Quentin ends up in jail on a charge of murder.

 

The Poe Shadow uses the realist convention of historical documentation in order to give the novel an illusion of reality. It does, after all, contain references to real people, places and events. Pearl weaves reality and fiction, research and imagination to give us “reliable” versions of the last four days of Poe’s life. His use of the language of the nineteenth century and depiction of Baltimore and Paris in those times is masterful. However, the last few pages of the book are confusing as the narrative slips from one narrator to the other. First we get Baron Dupin’s version of what could have happened to Poe in the last four days before his death. When you have more or less accepted that version, you get Dupont’s. And as we turn the pages for the final closure, Quentin Clark declares that he is no longer going to make public his findings about what really happened to Poe.

 

Like all post-modern writers, Pearl constantly toys with the readers’ intentions and interpretations. While he creates a narrator who is obsessed with detail, authority, intention, reference — traits of a scholarly detective — he also subverts detective fiction (a genre popularised by Poe) by taking it into two different directions (one shown by Dupin and the other by Dupont) rather than to a closure. By its very nature, detective fiction moves backward in an attempt to answer the whodunit question. All the logic, reasoning, and empirical research leads to a singular, unequivocal truth. But The Poe Shadow gives us only a semblance of a closure.

 

Echoes of Poe’s works and those of his contemporaries make this book a rich, subtle and complex experience. The two versions of Poe’s last days suggest that literary meaning is irrevocably ambiguous and plural, and it is fallacious to imagine that reality can be mirrored in literature. What is the truth about Poe’s death? Pearl leaves it to readers to choose the version they find most plausible. A novel that starts off with “realism” as its premise ends up questioning the very nature of truth and reality. That is the power of this extremely well-written and entertaining book.