ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to consider the ways in which contemporary novelists comment metafictionally not just on the Victorian period, but on its fiction. It considers their own relationship towards the implications of narrative closure, seeing how this meshes with their experimentalism. Michael Dibdin’s technique in introducing his novel makes The Last Sherlock Holmes Story a classic example of metafiction: that is, as Patricia Waugh explains the term in the opening chapter of her book Metafiction, he is engaging in the exploration of a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction. Fiction usually pretends to conform to the reality: the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight - but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favours win’. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates others; in fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses simultaneously all of them.
