The Final Solution is Michael Chabon going through the genre ghetto and trying to bring them to a wider audience. With The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay he dealt with comics, with Gentlemen of the Road he aimed more at a fantasy/adventure tail and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was a science fiction book (more in the vein of The Man in the High Castle than spaceships and space opera). The Final Solution is a detective novel and if you’re going to write a detective novel, then you might as well aim high and shoot for a Sherlock Holmes book. Although Holmes’ name is never mentioned in the book, it is apparent to all that it is him. So did Chabon pull it off?

Yes and no. This is more of a Chabon book than a Sherlock Holmes book. Set in the waning years of World War II, an old man who reads bee magazines and talks about his old doctor friend saves a young boy from falling on the train tracks. The boy is mute, but the boy’s companion, a grey parrot does speak. When it speaks, it recites some numbers in German in addition to some German opera and poetry. When a man at the hotel dies and the parrot goes missing, the old man agrees to help out. But he doesn’t promise to solve the murder, only to find the parrot, so he can return it to the boy. And if the murder is solved along the way, so much the better.

The style of the book is taken from the 1800s with long flowery sentences driving the book. The old man goes about finding clues, determined to reunite the boy and his parrot. The final chapter ties into the title, which is a play on Arther Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem and the Nazi Final Solution told from the point of view of the parrot. It’s an odd choice and leaves a lot of questions unanswered and open to interpretation. Overall it a good story as a stand alone Chabon novel and a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. Not Chabon’s best work, but a good story. Recommended.