John Pearson ruminates on the film Mr Holmes.
Have you seen the film Mr Holmes, looking in on the later years of the once-renowned detective of that name? It is 1947. The great man, now 93, lives a relatively quiet, sedentary life in his house, its garden on the clifftop beside the sea, cared for by a housekeeper who, with her young son, shares his home. Of course it is fiction, but then so were every one of the Sherlock Holmes stories which many of us read surely, at some time or another, living the adventures alongside the hero? Just as we once thrilled to the high spots, the stylish and rather eccentric life of the fictional detective, he and others like him perhaps deserve our attention now. Are we to abandon all who once brightened long dull days for us, whether in life or in fiction, now that they are old and out of the limelight? We see how the mighty man is not so much fallen but, rather, in this case gently settled into relative obscurity in his declining years. We see him test and measure his own mental faculties with his old forensic precision and we share the awareness of the doctor who attends him that, to our sorrow perhaps, they are now losing the razor sharpness they displayed of old. In Sherlock we recognise an elderly friend or parent perhaps; a man who, though now in his early 90s, still enjoys a walk to the coast and a paddle in the sea with the young boy but who, until they set out together, forgets they have agreed to go. He has the occasional fall, scrabbles rather helplessly to recover objects which he has dropped. But he retains a pride in having his own room, his own treasures, when he can find them. Mr Holmes’ tale here is ultimately one of settling a debt to one individual in particular. To do this he is forced to break with a habit of a lifetime. Many of his later years are spent reflecting on the (he would say) factual accounts of his famous cases, and throughout the film he is writing up a ‘real’ account of his last one (over-embellished by his friend John Watson, he feels). Now, he realises that for the first time ever he must write a work of fiction, albeit a very short one. For years he has told a certain man that his father deserted that man and his mother. Not wishing to spoil your enjoyment of the film, if you have not seen it, I shall merely say that he now chooses to tell the man a different story. He is moved to do this by a realisation of the emotional effect on his housekeeper and her son of the loss of the boy’s father. For 70 years or more he has remained a confirmed and rather self-centred bachelor, immune to the influences of family life from all except the rather mysterious Mycroft. He is learning, now that it is almost too late, about the effects of love and of loss. The above presents an interesting paradox, I feel. We live today in an age when we are persuaded that everybody must know all the facts, all the truths about everything. Added to this, it might be supposed that as people near the end of their lives they should ‘come clean’, clear up any uncertainties. Mr Holmes prepares to depart this life one day, not by setting the record straight but by twisting it in a rare act, for him, of compassion, an act which, had he performed it thirty or forty years earlier, would have sorely tested the integrity of a man so bound up with facts and evidence. So, as we get older how are we to ‘clear the decks’? Do we ‘kiss and tell all’? Do we kiss and say nothing or do we kiss and tell a few white lies? Another piece of information which the fictional detective reveals to the viewer, incidentally, is that he rarely actually wore a deerstalker whilst pursuing a case. That was a fiction, a PR gimmick dreamt up by Dr Watson! More fiction within fiction – gets complicated doesn’t it?
Dr John Pearson is Chair of SOF Trustees. He has recently retired from his job as a lecturer at Northumbria University.