Book Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

By Simon Demetriou

The Mimicking of Known Successes is concerned with the work of human scholars on Jupiter attempting to reconstruct life on Earth in an idealistic attempt to return to the planet that the ancestors of Malka Older’s Jupeterian inhabitants fatally destroyed. So, the title ostensibly refers to these restoration attempts. But I cannot believe that there isn’t a knowing irony to the title in so far as Older’s novel is an obvious attempt at a sci-fi Sherlock Holmes.

The story is narrated by Pleiti, a Classics scholar (Classics referring not to Latin and Greek, but to mid-twentieth century human civilisation), who winds up as the helpful but sometimes dubious, sometimes sidelined, sidekick to Mossa, a senior investigator on the track of a suicide that is obviously something more. So far, so Watson-and-Holmes. Now, imagine that Holmes and Watson were lovers at university; and that instead of pistols and pugilism, Holmes’ key weapon was a whip; and that Holmes never produced anything other than the most obvious and superficial deductions. If what you end up with is an idea of a Sherlock Holmes story with added lesbians and Indiana Jones touches, but less Sherlock Holmes, you’ll be on the right track.

Now, for some, this might sound great. Indeed, if you enjoyed the Benedict Cumberbatch version of Holmes, there’s every chance you’ll enjoy this, even though Older’s failings relative to Conan Doyle are different to those of Moffat and Gatiss. And I can’t pretend that I hated the book. Indeed, in the contrast of Pleiti’s tentative, backward-looking idealism with Mossa’s pragmatic focus on the here and now, Older does touch upon some interesting questions regarding how far looking to the past can ever be a reliable or desirable way to live a life. And I quite liked the weird fixation with scones, despite its heavy-handedness as an obvious Victorian-y quirk.

But, for this reader at least, this wasn’t enough. It is a particular bugbear of mine when writers try to have characters tell the reader things for which no other evidence exists and expect us to take the character’s word for it. This is lazy writing, and it is unfortunately rife in The Mimicking of Known Successes. Both Mossa and Pleiti are forever making references to Mossa’s methods, which are apparently so sophisticated as to defy explanation. Except she never draws a conclusion that the reader couldn’t guess.

If you’re going to bang on about how great this detective you’ve invented is, it would generally be a good idea to have invented a really great detective. Malka Older hasn’t.