Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Winning Effort Stumbles Badly At the End, 8 Oct 2001
Most people who know a little about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series know that at one point Doyle got sick of the detective series and killed off his star character, only to be forced into "resurrecting" him after a two year absence. Here, in one of the many, many, many, modern takes on the Holmes series, eminent Tibetan author Norbu details Holmes adventures incognito in India and Tibet during those two years. The role of Dr. Watson (both as bumbling sidekick and chronicler) is here assumed by Hurree Chandar Mookerjee, a Bengali spy lifted from yet another work of fiction, Rudyard Kipling's "Kim" (and just to be totally clear, he was based on a real Indian who spied for the British!). The adventures initially consist of a plot by the henchmen of Holmes' now-dead nemesis, Moriarity, to avenge their leader's death. Holmes ends up hiding out and getting the notion to make a pilgrimage to Lhasa to meet the Dalai Lama-something strictly forbidden for Westerners. This leads to the second main adventure, which involves helping the young 13th Dalai Lama (a man critical to real-life modern Tibetan history) evade the deadly machinations of the powerful Manchu Imperial agents in Lhasa.Norbu should first and foremost be commended for being able to almost perfectly capture the correct period speech for each character (there is a lengthy glossary at the back for all the Hinustani phrases and period slang). I say" almost" because I found Hurree's speech to be just a little too over the top, even for the type of educated servant of the Empire he is-it's just a shade too forced at times. Norbu has also captured the period perfectly and manages to seamlessly insert his own agenda by portraying early Chinese imperialism in Tibet. The portrayal of Holmes is excellent (enthusiastic, abrasive, arrogant, drug abuser) up to a point. That point is the final quarter of the book which starts melding the Holmesian world of deduction and reason with the Tibetan world of mysticism and occult powers. Up until then, I had been having great fun, but once people started throwing around hellfire and erecting mental shields and whatnot, I lost faith and interest in the whole exercise. It's not that I'm prejudiced against such things (I've played sword and sorcery role-playing games for 15 years), I just don't think they belong in the hyper-deductive world of Sherlock Holmes. It's well known that Conan Doyle had a strong belief in the occult and was fascinated with the spirit world, but to mix that in with Holmes just rubs me wrong.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sherlock Holmes meets Darth Vader!, 29 Mar 2001
By A Customer
I started out loving this book. The setting in the Himalayas and the use of the "real history" of Sherlock Holmes whilst supposedly dead in the falls of Reichenbach is a brilliant idea and brilliantly carried out.The end is dreadful. If you want to find Moriarty giving "vulcan death grips" and fighting a surreal fanatsy then fine. To me it seems like the author..finished the end of the book in one night! The cover is pretty though!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A James Bond story with a serious twist, 28 Dec 2000
By A Customer
When you buy this book, make sure you have a free evening or weekend in front of you. Once started you cannot stop. The book demonstrates how the world is shrinking. Who would have imagined that a Tibetan would be able to write, perfectly, a book in the style of Conan Doyle. It is so realistic that I started to wonder if it was indeed a late discovered manuscript. Even though nothing is sacrificed for the excitement of the story the books imparts useful and interesting information about Buddhism, Shambala, the Dalai Lama, Tibet and its occupation by China. The story is an excellent script for a movie. It will rival the James Bond movies for excitement but with a serious twist.
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