This autobiography of Arthur Conan Doyle describes the varied aspects of his professional life as a doctor, sportsman, adventurer, political campaigner and author. It recounts the many true adventures that befell him and his relationship with such figures as Oscar Wilde, Kipling and Arthur Balfour.
It's going to be a incoherent review, the circumstances make it difficult for me to write something well-thought out these days, I hope it will get better soon.
Plus, as I was reading Doyle's memories, I was often changing my mind about him : I alternately wanted to slap him and hug him !
- As a sportsman, he made me think of Captain Hastings (with more brains and less taste for pretty women) : eager to practice any sport, to risk danger, to travel all over the world and experience new (action) things : the kind of man who can't remain sitting for long, he loves adrenaline !
- As a military, Victorian man, I found him sometimes stuffy, with very strict, colonial oriented, conservative opinions and a dreadful view on women (those awful gossips who are only useful at decorating dinner tables!) and it made me angry at him. Several times.
- I found his passion and his quest for truth in spiritism touching. I know it was all the fashion back then, but he hardly seems like a man subject to fashion. He had doubts, questions and he looked for answers. Many people must have thought him a fool, he carried on anyway.
- For a conservative, stuffy man, he had a deep admiration for the non-conservative, non-stuffy Oscar Wilde.
- My opinions and his differ on many subjects, but I admire him for one thing : if he felt something was wrong, unjust, needed to be changed, he went for it, he fought. He wrote, he met important men, he travelled to meet people (more important men - women were merely decorative in dinners, in those days), he thought out plans, he acted. Do you know he's at the origin of the invention of the plastic buoy ?! To save drowning sailors. And that he was very much in favour of the Channel tunnel (for commerce and tourism, not for war). At a time when lots of people whine about what's wrong in the world and nobody lifts a finger, it feels good to see someone actually do something for what he believes in.
- As he was writing about hunting as a sport and having begun the book with whale hunting, I was about to growl when he started talking about animals and their pain, how cruel hunting can be and how he practised it less and less, and he flipped me like a pancake...
- When he spoke about war and what must be done (and I got a little bored and saw him again as a stuffy old boy), he suddenly shifted to all the accidents he experienced in his life and talks about them with such nonchalance, such good humour that you can't help but smile at his good mood.
Of course, I'm going to keep reading Conan Doyle's books. I'm re-reading Sherlock Holmes, I'll then jump to professor Challenger, to Brigadier Gérard and everything I can lay my hands on. I adored him as a teenager, I still have a fondness for him in spite of many things. I think what got me what his wonderful sense of humour. He's like a stuffy old uncle who jumps everywhere, talks about all his adventures around the world and makes jokes with a spark in his eyes - you don't really agree with everything he says, but you can't help loving him. I think I'll always be partial to him !
No comments:
Post a Comment