Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
short novel The Parasite has inspired a whole series of articles, of which this is
the last.
It is being published today
to mark the 87th anniversary of Conan Doyle’s death: he died on this day, July
7th, in 1930.
Although I had never even
heard of The Parasite until a few weeks ago, many elements of the story seem
very familiar. They have activated memories of things I have read in other
books or experienced for myself; I have featured some of them in previous
articles. Here are some more connections that I have noticed:
The Parasite and John
Buchan
The Parasite reminds me a
little of John Buchan’s story The Gap in the Curtain, in which
people are trained to use the latent powers of their minds.
The volunteers are selected
for their sensitive nervous systems and inability to cope well with the normal,
physical world. This partly matches what Austin Gilroy says about himself: he
calls himself a highly psychic, sensitive man.
The volunteers in The Gap in
the Curtain are very different from Agatha Marden, whom Helen Penclosa
successfully hypnotises as a demonstration of her power to control healthy,
well-balanced people.
This makes me think of
something that the eastern mystic and guru Kharáma says to the villain Dominick Medina in Buchan’s novel The Three Hostages:
"The key is there, but
to find it is not easy. All control
tends to grow weak and may be broken by an accident, except in the case of
young children, and some women, and those of feeble mind."
"That I know,"
said Medina almost pettishly. "But
I do not want to make disciples only of babes, idiots, and women."
"Only some women, I
said. Among our women perhaps all, but
among Western women, who are hard as men, only the softer and feebler."
Agatha Marden is hardly soft
and feeble, but she is not hard enough to be able to resist being hypnotised.
In any case, she was eager to try it out. Even so, it was quite an achievement
for Helen Penclosa to be able to control someone that even the great Kharáma
might have had trouble with!
There is a gap of 30 years
and an intervening World War between the publication dates of The Parasite and
The Three Hostages. There were probably many more ‘soft women’ around in 1894
than there were in 1924!
One trope that still worked
is the use of mysterious, remote and exotic locations to account for someone’s
powers: Helen Penclosa is West Indian; Kharáma is Indian.
