Review: The Adventures of Mary Darling, by Pat Murphy

Review: The Adventures of Mary Darling, by Pat Murphy

by Rich Horton

Pat Murphy's new novel, The Adventures of Mary Darling, is a clever mashup of Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes -- the one sentence elevator pitch might have been "Sherlock Holmes is engaged to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Darling children." In a sense this reminded me of her Max Merriwell trilogy (1999-2001), which I absolutely loved: three books linked in clever metafictional ways and also referencing classic texts such as the Odyssey, Tarzan, The Jungle Book, "The Hunting of the Snark", and The Hobbit*. Those three books (There and Back Again by Max Merriwell, Wild Angel, and The Adventures of Max Merriwell) are at one level simply great fun, offering the reader enjoyable plots, engaging characters (including Pat Murphy herself!), and the chance to play "catch the clever references". But at another lever they are after something deeper -- the metafictional (and "pataphysical"!) games have a serious point, and there is an abiding concern with gender roles and personal identity choices. The Adventures of Mary Darling does indeed do some similar things, though the levels of metafictional complexity aren't as extensive (partly in that there is only one book here) while the overtly serious aspects -- an examination, again, of gender roles, but also of British colonialism, with a soupçon of American and Canadian mistreatment of indigenous populations -- are more explicitly foregrounded (not always to the novel's benefit.)

I suppose I'll have to unpack some of that a bit later. But not to bury the lede -- in the end I was immensely entertained by The Adventures of Mary Darling. It's simply lots of fun -- and the more "serious" aspects after all do hit home: Victorian ideas about women's roles and rights were terribly unfair, the British Empire routinely and offensively misunderstood and oppressed the native inhabitants of their colonies, and the treatment of indigenous tribes in both Canada and the US was horrifying, particularly portrayed here regarding the attempts of Indian schools to erase tribal identities. One other aspect of the novel that works is a skeptical deconstruction of the character of Sherlock Holmes.

But maybe I should talk about the novel itself more! The story is ostensibly told by Mary Darling's granddaughter (so Wendy Darling's daughter) in an attempt to set straight the story of Peter Pan, given that J. M. Barrie got so much wrong, and left so much out. It begins with the night of the disappearance of Wendy, John, and Michael Darling. Naturally the parents, George and Mary Darling, are distraught. But Mary's uncle (and foster father) is a certain Dr. John Watson -- and before long Sherlock Holmes has agreed to help investigate the apparent kidnapping. However, Mary Darling is not impressed by Holmes, and is even less happy when her husband seems ready to commit her to a "rest cure"**, even though if anyone needs psychiatric care it's surely George. So Mary decides to set off for Madagascar herself -- partly based on the one clue Sherlock Holmes found -- a leaf from a tree native to the Indian Ocean. 

Thus John Watson realizes he must follow his niece -- and he has encountered an ally, Sam Smalls, a native of the Solomon Islands, who is involved with the criminal side of London society, but is an educated and intelligent man. And -- he turns out to have known Mary Darling -- and her brother Tom -- from their childhood. Much of the next long section of the novel, then, expands on the back stories of the characters -- Mary Watson Darling in particular, but also Sam Smalls, George Darling, and even Captain Hook. We learn about Mary's childhood in Australia, with her artist mother Alice, who drew pictures of fairies. We learn about Sam's childhood in the Solomons, the son of an English missionary and a native woman.  We even see an extended portrayal of the origination of the "Red Indians" in Peter Pan, who turn out to have been members of the Kanien'kehá:ka nation, living on the St. Lawrence River, who escaped the prospect of seeing their children sent to Indian school by joining a circus act, and eventually setting out on their own, only to shipwreck on Neverland.

These back stories all give information but I wonder if some of them should have been curtailed a bit. The history of the Kanien'kehá:ka band is pretty much dropped, for example, which makes their section seem largely unnecessary. And there is a sense of over-idealization of some of the indigenous characters -- their characterizations and attitudes don't fully convince. Some of the back stories seem a bit contradictory, but I think that may have been intended -- we see a slow unraveling of the layers of both well-intended deceit, and of not always reliable memory, as the story continues. And there are unresolved issues -- Mary's mother's true fate, for instance. These sort of things are just fine, and add realism to the novel. I was also intrigued by a couple of namedrops -- Mary's mother is named Alice, for example, and another important character is named Hawkins, and I wonder if Murphy intended sly references to Wonderland and Treasure Island thereby. 

The book is fun throughout but it really takes off when we start to follow the parallel journeys of Mary Darling on one ship; and of John Watson, along with Sherlock Holmes, Sam Smalls, and George Darling on another. I won't detail what happens -- suffice it to say that Watson and George are confronted with some blind spots they have developed, and that they change as a result, and that Holmes too is confronted by his blind spots, and stubbornly retains his blindness. Mary Darling is resolute and of course ultimately successful, and she is allowed to fully integrate some previously conflicting elements of her life -- she is happy to be a wife and a mother, but she also wants to be an independent and powerful woman -- and she finds a way to have it all, in a sense. Perhaps unresolved is the problem of Peter Pan himself -- but one can't have everything!

I really enjoyed this novel. It combines a fun and involving story with some probing deconstruction of 19th century adventure literature, and of the colonialist attitudes behind much of that literature. The characters of Mary Darling and John Watson in particular are delightful, and the sharp examination of Sherlock Holmes' character is bracing (even if a bit of it is unfair -- Holmes' skepticism about the existence of fairies is, after all, justified -- and one incident in which he described the unreliability of photographic evidence hits home in particular when we remember how Arthur Conan Doyle himself was taken in by the "Cottingham Fairies".) (I will say that George Darling remains a bit hard to credit.) Less central characters such as Lady Hawkins, the disgraced doctor Rumbold, and Sam Smalls are also interesting. Recommended.

*While the Tolkien estate's predatory behavior in defense of their copyright is not so evil as that of the Doyle estate, they do often go well overboard in using their access to legal defense, and the way they caused the suppression of There and Back Again by Max Merriwell was disgraceful, in my opinion.

**Sometimes I wonder if I read the same articles an author read while researching their story, as not long ago I encountered a piece on the inventor of the "rest cure", Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, which described that rather horrifying treatment. (Mitchell was a very prominent American doctor, and a decent writer of fiction, and his work outside the rest cure was apparently quite impressive.)