![]() ![]() It finds expression in the beneficent presence of Gabriel Betteredge, one of the great butlers in world literature in the satirically absurd presence of Drusilla Clack, a religious fanatic whose poverty of spirit matches the poverty of her purse and in the mutually contentious presences of Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder, a charming young pair whose romantic ups and downs mark the rhythm of this great saga. ![]() The spirit of comedy, enhanced by Collins’s deployment of multiple narrators, is equally prominent. There’s the use of opium for purposes that are by turns criminal, medicinal, and experimental. There’s the strange appearance in the Yorkshire countryside of a trio of Brahmins who have pledged to recover the Moonstone by any means necessary. ![]() There’s the midnight theft of the eponymous jewel (a lustrous diamond, stolen years earlier from a statue of Vishnu in his incarnation as the Hindu moon god). Sensationalistic elements lie thick on the ground, certainly. This first-ever English detective novel was born of a marriage between the English sensation novel and the English comic novel. ![]()
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