The Poe Shadow

I'm not sure how this story would come across to a reader who has little or no familiarity with Poe's life and work. It certainly helps if you've read some of the key stories (especially the Dupin detective stories) and have at least a superficial knowledge of his biography.

That being said . . . this is a fascinating attempt to piece together the events that led up to Poe's death. The author, Matthew Pearl, allegedly uncovered several new details that are worked into the novel. I have both a physical copy of the book and the unabridged CD audiobook, and I'm glad I have both, since the physical book has a historical note at the end that the audiobook didn't have, and the CD version has a track where the author explains--in his own words--the research he did and summarizes what we know (and what we don't know) about Poe's final days.

If you're getting the impression from all of this that I find the true events behind the novel more interesting than the fictionalized parts . . . that would be correct. Which isn't really a slight on the author--rather, it's a testament to his ability to weave fact and fiction together.

So why 4 stars and not 5? A couple of things prevent me from giving this a perfect rating. Early on, it's kind of hard to relate to the main characters' obsession with Poe's death. He basically throws away his life and career (at least for most of the book) in an attempt to salvage Poe's reputation. That's some serious dedication that I don't think I'd ever be willing to emulate for ANY author, and there are a few that I'm pretty dedicated to.

The other weakness (as I see it) is that the "drawing room" scene in the novel where all of the facts of Poe's final days are assembled and explained by one of the characters gets a bit too minute and hairy for my taste. I actually found Pearl's informal narration of the facts and his own original research to be more interesting than his character's version--the same goes for the historical note at the end of the physical book.

Definitely a recommended read for Poe fans and those interested in historical mysteries inspired by fact, though! I'm glad I read this.

P.S. My favorite Poe stories are probably "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The former because of its plot and its startlingly vivid and graphic imagery, and the latter for its brilliant main character and its importance in the history of literary detective work.

Having read The Dante Club with relish, I settled into The Poe Shadow with expectations of gruesome murders, conspiracy and learned men falling upon a mystery with all the pomp and refinement of a Dickensian Sherlock Holmes.

Alas, though I enjoyed the setup, the second act in Paris irreparably undermines the rest of the story. Aside from glacial pacing, it sets up a flawed conceit – that the protagonist would care who discovers the truth behind Poe's final days, and wouldn't be grateful both the Baron and Duponte set upon the task.

Consequently, the book lacks peril, and relies instead on this contrived race to veracity. Coupled together with the narrator's implausibly good hearing (he is able to to hear every word spoken between people he must stay hidden from), some deductions dressed up as elementary that would hold less water than a sieve, and a love story so neglected it is guilty of cruelty to sub-plots, The Poe Shadow should be read nevermore.

This intriguing book hovers between novel and literary investigation.

An obsessive fan of Poe, who sounds like a Poe character himself, sets out to determine what happened during the unexplained last few days of the author’s death, to find out why and how he died. He guesses that the Sherlock-Holmes-like character Dupin, who appears in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other Poe stories was based on a “real” man, and seeks to identify the model and enlist him in his cause.

We are led through meticulously researched and fascinating versions of Baltimore and Paris in 1849-1852; and are introduced to a bizarre and fascinating set of characters, including two who might have been the model for Dupin.

At times this reads like a suspense/mystery novel with a literary theme (which was what I had expected after having read and enjoyed Pearl’s first novel The Dante Club. But at other times (and just as enjoyable), the fiction (with the fictitious narrator main character) seems just a device for presenting and analyzing new evidence that the author actually uncovered about Poe’s last days (as he proudly points out in the “Historical Note” at the end), and new insights into Poe’s personality and genius.

Now I’m hooked. I’m going to have to read all of Poe’s stories…

I loved The Dante Club (reviewed in July). It was intelligent, and pure geeky fun, and I had a lovely time picking my way among the corpses in 19th century Boston. So I jumped at the chance to take The Poe Shadow on paperbackswap.com.

I should preface this by admitting I haven't read much Poe. I have a couple of collections; I've just ... never gotten around to it. But I'm familiar with his most famous poems, I knew who C. Auguste Dupin was, and I knew a little about Poe's life and reputation - about the fact that though he was often condemned for being a drunkard he was not, and in fact had a very low tolerance for alcohol. And about his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, and his despair at her early death. But the only work I've read about him before this was some dreadful thing I can't recall the name of and won't look up which cast him and P.T. Barnum as detectives... This had to be light years better.

And it was. Especially in the beginning I had as much fun as I did with The Dante Club. The story is told in the first person by Quentin Clark, an attorney in Baltimore in 1849 who has long enjoyed reading Poe. "Enjoyed" is actually an understatement; Clark's interest in the poet and his work begins to sound like obsession, and that becomes full-blown as the book proceeds - but it begins with his defiance of his family's opinion that Poe is a dangerous influence. He reads every scrap that he can find, and enters into a correspondence with Poe, even offering his legal services pro bono if they are needed to defend the magazine Poe dreams of starting.

Upon Poe's death, Clark is distressed by the tone of newspaper articles and essays. Most of them paint him, obliquely or outright, as a drunk, and most take the tone that he didn't contribute much to the universe and won't much be missed. Outraged, Clark begins a campaign to try to gain retractions and corrections, to try to rehabilitate Poe's reputation, which leads by various paths to his quest to find the real man who was Poe's inspiration for Dupin, the genius of detection. Surely the real Dupin can discover the truth about Poe's death and clear his name.

The quest leads Clark to Paris, which is in an upheaval of government; it has not been so long since the French Revolution, and now the republic is beginning to give way to a new empire under the Bonapartes. It's dangerous, but the obsession is strong, and Clark soon has two possible Dupins on his hands: the attorney Baron Dupin, whom Clark had written earlier, and Duponte, who is the new lead contender. Baron Dupin is a charlatan and showman, and Clark decides he can't be the one - especially as he learns more about Duponte, an investigator who fits the descriptions in Poe's stories perfectly. He works to bring the latter back to Baltimore, and to complicate matters the former comes too, along with his wife (a beautiful assassin) and a matched set of men who appear to be hunting him for reasons unknown.

It's not a spoiler to state that Clark winds up accused of a murder; that's given on the first page of the book. And I don't think it's a spoiler to say that that's about when the book started to lose me. Halfway through the book, not the first page. Clark's need to exonerate Poe grows to a state in which he can do nothing else; he loses his practice, and, through her family, his fiancee, and shortly is in danger of losing the home he inherited from his parents as his aunt brings a case against him stating he has lost his sanity. Between simply being a little fed up with a man who would sacrifice everything without even a thought - and not even so much the fact of the sacrifice as the pain it caused his family and beloved Hattie - and behaving in a thoroughly unreasonable manner in pursuit of a noble goal; and being more than a little fed up with the prospects of an International Conspiracy (I hate International Conspiracy as Tolkien despised allegory: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence") - the book started to lose me, and never really got me back. I finished it - but it was a long slog. I read a review that referred to Clark as an unreliable narrator: quite right. While he doesn't necessarily intentionally lie to the reader, he makes wild assumptions, changes his mind, and becomes somewhat unhinged. That reviewer had a time of it with the mid-19th century language; I didn't find that nearly as difficult as I often do (it's usually harder to read pseudo-19th-century than the real thing, I find). That was the least of my problems with the book.

On the whole, I'm glad I read it. I learned a good deal - for one thing, I'm going to try very hard to avoid referring to Poe as "Edgar Allan Poe", as he hated it, with good reason. (Or he might not have; I'm told that's a myth. Which calls into question every single other thing put forward as fact in the novel. Which is troubling.) For another, it took the taste of that other Poe/Barnum book out of my mouth; there's a certain irony in this book rehabilitating the name of Poe for me as Clark fought to do in Baltimore. And I'm going to read Poe, soon. But I don't think this will come up for a reread very soon. It felt disjointed in places, and as though Pearl lost the reins for a while and was a passenger in a runaway carriage: as if Pearl's research into Poe and his death created in him much the same condition as he describes in Clark. Method writing? Maybe. The Poe Shadow both explained and created allure about Poe, and raised Poe in my estimation while, sadly, lowering Pearl a notch or two. But this didn't kill my respect; on the contrary. I did love Dante; I do respect the tremendous amount of work that went into making The Poe Shadow - and his third, latest book is The Last Dickens (Drood!). I look forward to it. I hope it's more like the first book than the second ... ~Stewartry

I can't put my finger on what exactly bugged me about this book. I trudged through it, telling myself that it had to get better, right? Nope...

VERY FACINATING CONCEPT- PEARL TRULY TRANSPORTS THE READER BACK TO LATE 1840'S BALTIMORE-EXTREMELY WELL RESEARCHED- FINE CHARACTERIZATIONS

This started off quite slowly but it's a good mystery read and I'm glad I stuck with it. A lot of the prose can be quite long-winded and think it could have done with a better edit.

So...the common saying is that "the third time's the charm"--right? Not necessarily. A couple of challenges asked us to give a book we'd never been able to finish another try. So, I decided on The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. I tried to read it a couple of times and just couldn't finish it. This year was the chance to change that. For good measure, I also added it to my TBR Pile list for Adam's challenge. That would ensure that I read the darn thing.

Okay. So, I did. And I didn't like it any better than the other two times I tried. The first attempt came after reading Pearl's The Dante Club--which was an excellent serial killer mystery. I enjoyed it so much that I went right out and got The Poe Shadow from the library and started to read it....and came to a screeching halt about 40 pages in. Then when Patty, my friend, gifted me a copy I gave it another go. I managed to get a bit further to my standard 100 pages and gave it up as a lost cause. This time round I finished it. And all I can say is....I'm glad that's over.

Here's your basic peek at the plot: It's 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. Edgar Allan Poe has just been buried, virtually unmourned, and his friends and family have all written him off as a drunken sot. Nobody seems to think there was anything odd about what happened to Poe. Except for Quentin Clark. Clark is a young lawyer who thinks Poe was the greatest writer ever and becomes obsessed with investigating the truth of Poe's death. He sets out to find the real August Dupin--the man Poe based his detective upon--to help him get to the bottom of a plot that seems to involve international political agents, a female assassin, and the dark, corrupt slave trade. Quentin will be marked insane and have to prove not only that his suspicions are correct but also that he has all his marbles. Otherwise, he's going to lose his friends, his career, his reputation, and the girl he loves....

This is such a disappointing book after The Dante Club. It's poorly plotted with a pace that moves about as quickly as a herd of turtles. It also makes no sense. Quentin's motivation for his intense obsession and willingness to give up his livelihood is murky at best and not really explained at all. It's very unclear whether all the plots and machinations are really happening or if he's imagining things. Pearl makes a great deal out nothing. And in the end, I just plain didn't care what happened to Poe and whether Quentin could prove it and get on with his life. Not because I don't think the death of Poe wasn't mysterious and that there couldn't be a story in it--but because as far as I can tell, Pearl didn't really make it into a story interesting enough to be worth telling.

Quentin is also an extremely unsympathetic protagonist. He's annoying and creates difficulties and adversaries where he has no need. And for a lawyer, he's not terribly bright. The Dupin proto-type is constantly pointing out the most obvious things to him. He doesn't just miss the connections that a great detective would make--he misses connections that are all but labeled "Look at THIS, this is important." One has to wonder why the girl would wait around for him to come to his senses and get his head out of the Poe problem. She can do much better for herself. Not recommended at all to anyone.

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Previous Review comments:

I really wanted to read this one--having loved The Dante Club. But I couldn't even finish it.

Postscript: I have now received this as a Christmas gift. Am going to give it another try.

Okay, so I have now tried again. Same result. I just cannot finish this one. I did, actually, make it a bit further and just when I thought that it simply had a slow beginning and was now getting better then Pearl dumped me in France with Quentin Clark harrassing the man that Dupin was supposedly based on. Totally lost me there. Not even interested in seeing how it comes out. My apologies to my gifter...I just can't do it.

My advice...Read _The Dante Club_ (It is a FAR superior book). Skip this one. I hope his Dickens book is better.