...Holmes’s books, while biographically persuasive, always feel subtly personal. The 'Footsteps principle' allows the narrative to build on clearly visualized scenes, even as the overall tone is that of intimate, civilized conversation. Above all, Holmes never comes across as stiff or stuffy ... All in all, This Long Pursuit offers an abundance of literary entertainment and instruction.
While Holmes divides his essays into sections, each can be read as a riff on Virginia Woolf’s sly observation that the actual length of a person’s life is open to dispute. Lives don’t necessarily end on deathbeds after all. Biographically speaking, Holmes points out, the dead are immortal, the more so if you acknowledge the essential open-endedness of the exercise. Documents surface. Memories fail. In an especially loose-limbed chapter he takes his uncertainty out for a stroll, reflecting back to that seminal summer ... He is particularly eloquent about Shelley, with whom he has lived intermittently for decades and who met his end in an 1822 shipwreck.
...history haunts Holmes at every turn, creating a book in which the past persistently peers over the present’s shoulder, collapsing the distance between then and now ... In the tradition of most successful historians and biographers, Holmes seems to achieve this intimacy with the past by immersing himself, trance-like, within a given terrain, with every brick or rock or tree a talisman tugging him deeper and deeper into the immense well of human experience. Holmes’s closeness with his surroundings sometimes invites the reader in, yet occasionally shuts him out.
In a wonderful essay, 'Shelley Unbound,' Holmes discusses the warping effect the actual events in a subject’s life have on our later assessment of that subject. This is a very odd, very astute observation, and one he explores brilliantly ... Holmes has called himself 'an experimental biographer . . . fascinated equally by lives as they are lived, and lives as they are told.' The pieces here are an expression of that ... as each sends the story off in a different direction. Life may be short, but biography never ends.
Some of the 15 essays here are autobiographical, but most provide an elegant glance at one historical figure or another, often those associated with Mr. Holmes’s earlier work ... This Long Pursuit can stand either as an introduction to his full-length works or as a reminder of what makes them so compelling.
The author’s focus remains sharp throughout, as he sketches his individuals’ lives, discusses the published biographies of them (from the earliest to the latest), and reveals his theories and beliefs about the writing of biography, beliefs that he has used to develop graduate courses in biography ... Most impressive, though, are Holmes’ erudition—is there a relevant text he has not read or a significant site he has not visited?—and his clear, sharply focused prose. Throughout, he manifests the patience and the persistence to do right by his subjects. Unparalleled research, transparent prose, and wide eyes can serve as a model for other biographers—indeed, for all other writers.
His effort is largely successful, though the book is slow-paced as he meanders from subject to subject. This elegantly written, curl-up-by-the-fire read will satisfy Holmes’s prior fans and introduce new readers to his works and ideas.
