THE POISON BELT
Arthur Conan Doyle
Paperback
(Independently published, July 14, 2020)
The Poison Belt, a novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is remarkable in that we, with the central characters, are permitted to witness what seems to be a global apocalypse, while enduring only minimal emotional fall out.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is, of course, best known for his iconic character Sherlock Holmes. His Professor Challenger, the central character of The Poison Belt, however, is not well known to contemporary readers. The Poison Belt is the second of several science-fiction-like stories featuring Challenger and his cronies. It was, like so many of Doyle’s works, first published in The Strand. Challenger is like Holmes in a number of ways, notably they are both astonishingly logical, almost to the point of being unfeeling. And yet, Challenger is unlike Holmes in some important ways, as well. Apocalyptic experiences, at least in fiction, lead to predictable and sometimes passé questions about the nature of life, the human experience, one’s mortality, and, of course, the ultimate meaning of it all. In The Poison Belt, Doyle’s characters ask themselves these same sorts of questions. And the answers at which they arrive are ambiguous and equivocal at best.