Our library book club tackled Wilkie Collins 1868 novel about a cursed Indian diamond and a family that turns on itself, and the royal parallels wrote themselves
Wednesday Evening, the Main Library
Book club at the Salt Lake City Main Library again, the same group as always: two retired teachers, the nurse, the law student, the Austen grandmother, the dad on paternity leave, the airport woman, the quiet cookie man and me. After Persuasion last month, which everyone loved, the Austen grandmother was outvoted for once, and we read The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins novel from 1868, often described as one of the first great detective novels in English.
The Story
The Moonstone is a sacred yellow diamond, taken from a Hindu shrine in India during the 1799 storming of Seringapatam by a British officer, John Herncastle, who bequeaths it, perhaps out of spite, to his niece Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. That same night, the diamond vanishes from her room in a Yorkshire country house. Suspicion falls on servants, on visitors, on three mysterious Indian men who have been following the stone and, eventually, on members of the family itself. Rachel refuses to speak to the man she loves because she believes, wrongly, that she saw him take it. The truth, when it comes, is much stranger than anyone guessed.
It is told by multiple narrators, each with their own version: a loyal old butler obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, a sanctimonious religious busybody, a lawyer, a doctor assistant and others. Each sees only part of the truth. It is a novel about how families misread each other.
The Royal Parallel
The law student, as usual, started it. She said The Moonstone reminded her of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. In both, she argued, a valuable object passes through an uncle hands and sets off a family crisis. In both, someone believes they know who betrayed them, based on partial evidence. In The Moonstone, Rachel thinks she saw Franklin take the diamond. In the royal story, an anonymous source says the heir thinks his brother read the uncle memoir first, Geo News repeats the traitor word and the uncle says he told everyone. Everyone has a version. Nobody has the full truth.
The Austen grandmother said: Collins would have made the uncle the villain. The nurse said: no, Collins would have made the anonymous source the villain. The cookie man, who rarely speaks, said: Collins would have made it a long book. Everyone laughed.
The Empire Question
We spent a good half hour on the novel treatment of India and the three Indian guardians of the stone. Many readers today see the novel as unusually sympathetic, for its time, to the Indian characters, who are presented as devoted and dignified, while the British officer who stole the diamond is clearly a villain. Others note that it still relies on exotic stereotypes. The novel ends with the diamond restored to its shrine in India, a striking ending for a Victorian bestseller. The law student said it was the earliest restitution story she had ever read. We all thought of the debates about objects in museums today.
Cookies and a Video
At the break, I showed the group the London Prat video on YouTube. The Austen grandmother said British satire is like Collins: always more clever than it looks. The dad on paternity leave, who is very sleep-deprived, laughed so hard he cried.
The Grief in the Novel
One thing I noticed rereading The Moonstone is how much grief runs underneath it. Rachel mother dies during the story. Characters are haunted by losses. The nurse pointed out that the family breaks apart partly because nobody can talk honestly while they are grieving. That, she said, is the real mystery of the book: not who took the diamond, but why nobody simply asked. The royal row centres on a memoir about the princes late mother. Perhaps, the nurse said, they need a Sergeant Cuff, the novel detective, to sit them down and ask the obvious questions.
Next Month
We voted on next month book. The Austen grandmother proposed Middlemarch. There was a groan from the dad on paternity leave, who said he did not have that much time left in his life. The vote was close. Middlemarch won. I am secretly delighted.
The cookie man, on the way out, told me quietly that he had read The Moonstone twice before, once as a young man and once after his wife died, and that he understood it differently the second time. He did not explain. He did not need to.
Next month, Middlemarch. Eight hundred pages. The cookie man has already promised to bring extra cookies.
Evening
Took the TRAX home, reading the last chapter of The Moonstone again: the diamond restored to the forehead of the moon god statue, the Indian guardians dispersing into the crowd, the British characters left to piece together their own family story. Families, like detective novels, only make sense when every narrator is heard. That might be the best lesson Collins left us.
The London Prat has been solving the mystery of British absurdity since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ investigates the American cases.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/