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Cenacle - In hidden crypts and dark vaults, cenacles of secret religion meet to keep their flame alive.

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Cenacle - August 2006

Codex by Lev Grossman

August 31st 2006 03:41

We are featuring all the Dan Brown’s wannabes this week and today is the turn of Lev Grossman’s Codex.

Codex by Lev Grossman

Edward Wozny is a hotshot investment banker who is shifting his base from New York to London and has a two week holiday for that purpose. Our hero having never had a holiday is quite at a loss until he is called by a mysterious duchess on a mysterious assignment. The client has an old massive library which has never been moved out of its boxes and wants Wozny to move the books out of the boxes and arrange them on the shelf after cataloguing them. Why should an investment banker do this and not a librarian? We don’t know. Our hero initially chafes at the offer and but accepts it later. While arranging the books on the shelves, he is told to look for particularly one book__ a thirteenth- century book called A Viage to the Contree of Cimmerians purportedly written by Gervase of Langford, a compatriot of Chaucer.

Codex author Lev Grossman photo: Mary Pfaff

Edward has a few nerdy friends who give him a game called MOMUS which seems to simulate the daylight events happening to him. Then there is a mysterious duke who is playing a cat and mouse game with the duchess. Edward also meets Margaret, a research student on medieval literature writing a thesis on Gervase, who tells him the history behind the book he is seeking. In the seventeenth century, a hack publisher called Edward Forsyth had published a chapbook which became a sensational bestseller and which he claimed was based on a thirteenth century book of prophecies. Outside this claim however, nobody has ever heard of the book by Gervase and Margaret tells Edward that there was no such book. Before Edward can continue with looking for the book in the library, he is told that his services are no longer required.

We have read and seen this kind of stuff countless time before, haven’t we? A wealthy bourgeois man having a breakdown of conscience. Yeah, instead of helping the poor or joining the Indians, here he unpacks crates of books. What a novelty! Codex is a poorly written book which grafts Ian Caldwell’s The Rule of Four onto Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon. Don’t invest your time in it.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Thrillers

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The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman

August 30th 2006 04:37

The geographer in question is Al-Idrisi twelfth century geographer, whose name if you remember was usually thrown in the clash of civilizations debate two years ago. He first stayed at Baghdad and when things there became too hot, went to Sicilian court, which he left to draw a map of the world. The library in question is the curious collection of items which Al-Idrisi left behind in Sicily, all connected in some way to alchemy. The "library" was first stolen by a thief and then dispersed all over Eastern Europe.

In modern day New England small town called Lincoln, Paul Tomm, a twenty-three year old reporter who works for small community newspaper is asked to do an obituary about a Jaan Puhapaev, a reclusive Estonian professor of Baltic Studies, who has died of natural causes in his home. The facts about the professor are scarce but the few that emerge increase the mystery. The professor walked with a hand gun on his body and fired it no less than two times on the university campus. Why did the university rush to bury these incidents? And what about the surprising statements made by the pathologist who is doing the autopsy that the professor's body is surprisingly young and well-preserved for a man so old? Before he is run down by a wayward car that is?

Paul's assignment now becomes more of an investigative story than an obituary. He is joined in his quest by Paul's former professor and his young nephew who is a police detective. But quest is a big word for this essentially small town arm chair small talk.

Fasman, a reporter for The Economist, writes atmospheric prose that captures the nuances and shades of a small town ably. Also, the novel is peppered with tantalising vistas of Eastern European and ex-Soviet Republic countries and filled with a reporter's wisdom about the nature of tyranny and subversion. But, where it comes unstuck is the plotting. The novel alternates between Paul's fact-hunting for his story and the dispersion of the Al-Idrisi's collection, which in twentieth century is being slowly reassembled back. The two tracks run separately for a majority of the novel and they but coalesce briefly in the denouement where a bunch of old immortals pop up and tell Paul that he is too small to deal with big issues so back off, which being " the moderately moderate" he is, he does.

Before they vanish however, they give a lecture as to the clue of what it was all about. It is here when Fasman begins to explain alchemy, the casus belli of the plot, the novel rises above the maudlin humdrum of Katherine Neville's Motaigne chess set or Kate Mosse's labyrinthine grail and others like them. Fasman's alchemy is all about transformation and as he remarks Al-idrisi's transformative journey began from Baghdad and ended in Talinn, a former Soviet bloc. Surely he doesn't mean……?

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Thrillers

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The Eight by Katherine Neville

August 29th 2006 02:53

Long before Dan Brown even put pen to paper, long before the scholarly and literate thrillers based on some obscure European painting or the holy grail became a cottage industry, Katherine Neville wrote The Eight.

Charlemagne, the Frankish emperor is presented with a magnificent chess set by an Arabic subject. The chess set itself taps into power of the universe and hence, the mad scrambling for it. Charlemagne orders that it should be hidden away and it is promptly buried in a castle which later becomes a convent. Though hidden away, its secret was always known to a few power hungry tyrants down the ages and they all made an attempt to retrieve it. It is the time of French Revolution and the convent is about to be seized. So, the abbess divides the chess set into eight pieces and distributes it among eight nuns who are to protect it with their lives. For some reason, she gives the most vital part to a pair of giggling girls who are to act as collecting points for the rest of the group too. Predictably, they straight away walk into the arms of Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun who was after the chess set in the first place. From now on, Talleyrand, Robespierre, Wordsworth, pretty much every historical ghost whose name you have ever heard pops up and throws his hat into the ring.

The novel's heroine in the present, Catherine is a computer whiz kid who is promoted to a post in Algeria as a punishment for her sincerity. Last heard, Algeria is where the chess set was rumoured to be. Before she goes there, she is forced to befriend a chess-playing feminist Lily and influence her in a positive way. Lily takes her to a chess tournament where the Russian grandmaster Solarin is playing after so many years. Somebody is killed at the tournament and mayhem ensues.

The novel's historical pieces are amazing. One can only wistfully imagine what a wonderful historical novel Neville could have written if only she stuck to the form. But, all that good is undone by the most jejune action writing I ever read. Once, Solarin looks into Catherine's eyes and says, "You should not have come here", you roll your eyes too. And it only gets worse from there.

But The Eight was a huge success and still commands a following of many loyal fans. But if you read it now, it is only interesting in the sense that it shows you the first baby steps taken before Dan Brown arrived to assimilate this material properly in a thriller.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Thrillers

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Notes on Hollywood Sequels

August 28th 2006 03:37

One hour into Pirates of Carribean: Dead man’s Chest I wondered whether I walked into the wrong movie. Nothing that was happening was making sense to me. There were new characters and new plot lines all around which did not have even slightest connection to those I remembered from the first movie. Then, the narrative settled itself and I began to enjoy the movie. The same kind of bafflement would be felt I am sure if you had watched The Matrix Reloaded or the Chronicles of Van Riddick or Ocean Twelve.

I am not piling up random examples of movies which belong to different genres. What they have in common is a successful well-liked first movie and the second movie which invariably gets bad reviews. More than that, the structure of the second movie which tries to build a mythology around the first movie rather than continue with the adventure. The characters instead of having fun are now part of secret society of all their own, full of connections and relations which we never given even the slightest inkling; they look at us from their lofty heights of a mock mystique;they have a hierarchy and history; when they speak to each other, it is with meanings embedded from their past and future which were never shared with us.

Unlike other franchises like Superman or Spiderman which are based on an existing literature and therefore, have to be at least minimally faithful to their originals, these new franchises were all developed by Hollywood itself. The story does not move forward as in the second set; it moves in circles. What they betray is that current generation of myth-makers of Hollywood are fed on the college-bred theories of myth and fantasy. They might for the sake of business deign to design a first movie that follows the conventions of a thriller but once successful will spin, jack and entangle their narratives into a closed loop of speculative fiction which they try hard to emulate. And lose fans in the process.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Cinema

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Jonathan Strange and Mr.Norell by Susanna Clarke

August 27th 2006 03:23

It arrived on the scene with the hush excitement of greatness. This was not some drab marketing gimmick like Harry Potter, this was a literary novel. It popped out like Athena, fully-formed, from the author's head where it had been festering for 10 long years. Everybody had thought the habit of reading was dead or in the last pangs of dying; if it was still alive it was thanks to a few nerdy types who collect in foul-smelling universities, those last bastions of culture which valiantly fight to survive the marauding forces of capitalism. And then Harry Potter came along and everybody started reading like there was no tomorrow. We had thought people stuffed to their ears with the paraphernalia of decadent capitalism wouldn't read and they were reading and how. Clearly, fantasy was the way to go but not the ersatz magic of Harry Potter but real magic, the real magic of those strange woods of pre-glasnost. And I the sinner, who had been seduced by dark forces of Potterish Capitalism was willing to be redeemed by reading this novel.

It is 1807's England and magic is tragically dead though the magicians are not. They form societies and read papers and are content to remain gentleman-magicians " which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic—nor ever done anyone the slightest good". Now a rogue magician called Mr.Norrell comes along who actually believes that he can do magic. What arrogance! Anyway to prove his point to doubting Thomases, he raises a few statues off their bases and makes a lot of sound and noise. It is clear Magic is back in England.

Norrell's nemesis soon comes in the form of Jonathan Strange, a country gentleman who has cultivated his magic on his own and not from reading books like Mr.Norrell. Mr.Norrell accepts Mr. Strange as his pupil but it immediately become clear that their ideas of magic differ widely until it becomes a schism worth of Rimbaud-Verlaine or George Sand- Musset, if only half so romantic. But that's much later.

Meanwhile, magic is coming back to England; the woods are advancing; the fairies are seizing the beautiful; and there are dark whispers that the Raven King is about to return. Meanwhile, there are such drab things called wars; Great Britain is plagued by Napoleon on the continent and it desperately requires the service of its magicians which Mr.Strange is only too happy to provide. While he is busy battling on the dark forces abroad, his own sweetheart is abducted by the fairies. If you think this would provide the book with the much-needed twist, you are mistaken. The abduction is required only to negate the false comforts offered by the fairies. The true revolution will be brought forth only by the True King of England. And the Raven King returns, only he is black.

There is nothing wrong in a Black King of Britain of course but it now becomes now clear why this magic is so real when Harry Potter is only ersatz. This magic is real because it allows us to contemplate the victory of Social Justice which is an adult adult virtue instead of making us regress to latency-period fantasies which is what Harry Potter does with us childish adults.

If you haven't felt the aw-shiver at such a prospect and found the narrative unremittingly dull, the magic phony, the story lackadaisical, well you are still in your latency period.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Fantasy

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War Trash by Ha Jin

August 26th 2006 03:27

The narrator of Ha Jin's War Trash remarks at the very beginning of the novel that he is going to tell his story "in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy." That's an astonishing claim to make at the beginning of what is supposed to be a novel. Isn't documentary manner the hallmark of non-fiction rather than the fiction that we have in front of us? But Ha Jin clearly sticks to his claim and avoids any narrative flourishes, dramatic touches or moralistic overtones, divulging fact after fact with more ruthless clarity than any documentaries might possess. The result is brilliant fiction that opens our eyes to reality that often goes unnoticed in the shrillness of newspaper headlines.

Yo Yuan is a 73 years old Chinese guy visiting his son and grandchildren in America. On his stomach, below the navel is etched a long tattoo which reads "FUCK….U…..S…." Yuan is afraid that this will bar his entry to the US but he is not stopped at the airport. So, once he has met his grandchildren he proceeds to tell the story behind that tattoo and the gaps in it.

The novel then switches to the Korea War and Communist China has sent hundreds of its young men, including Yuan, to halt the advance of American imperialism. The optimism is short-lived as the army is quickly routed by the Americans and hundreds are taken prisoner. The rest of the novel deals with what happened in the prison camp as they wait to be released to an uncertain future: they can either migrate to Taiwan and lose their families or go back to mainland China and be treated as criminals. The mechanics of prisoner exchanges. The politics of war.

The book with its stark title arrived when the heat of Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay had not yet died down. But instead of stoking the flame further, it put the events in context and strangely provided a balm. You hear a lot about Geneva Conventions being tossed aside these days. And yet they were signed in the same period as this book is set in and it will show you exactly what kind of effect those conventions had then and by inference, now. It is not quite the same thing that you would expect. That is why I liked this book though it was a little hard to get used to its style.

After writing this notice, I went and read the review New York Times had given it. Though we are in agreement with its style, the reviewer and I seem to have read the books from opposite directions. It's a wonder how people can arrive at exactly opposite conclusions from reading the same material.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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The Lady and The Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

August 25th 2006 03:53

Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and The Unicorn treads the same path as her Girl with a Pearl Earring. Both use an object of art as a canvas and breathe scandal into it. This time, instead of a Vermeer’s painting, she takes up fifteenth-century set of tapestries and they allow her to inject more sex and heartbreak into the story than the Vermeers.

Jean le Viste, a fifteenth century aristocrat takes upon himself to commission a huge set of tapestries to cover his Grand Salle to celebrate his presidency of the Cours des Aides. Nicholas des Innocents, a Parisian artist is to do the job. Nicolas is a rake and it does not take long for him to lust after Claude, le Viste’s beautiful young daughter who is carefully watched over by her cold and fanatical mother, Genevieve. A situation ripe for explosion in fifteenth-century Europe where class differences were rigid and an artisan could never hope for a nobleman’s daughter. It is Genevieve who comes up with the idea of lady and the unicorn for the tapestries; a lady offering food and other inducements to a stubborn unicorn which finally gives in and lays its head in her lap; each tapestry representing one sense and the final one where the lady tames the unicorn, representing man’s spirit conquering the senses.

Nicholas does not realise how revolutionary a design he has made until he goes to Brussels where the tapestries are actually to be weaved. Georges de la Chapelle, an industrious weaver accepts the commission against his better judgement. His wife Christine will never be allowed to weave herself due to guild rules even though it is her fondest dream. Their daughter Alienor is a blind but precocious daughter has a grim fate in store for her. All these women find their way into the tapestries and Nicolas touches them all in one way or the other.

Chevalier uses multiple narrators in her novel which races to its tragic conclusion. Many people who have read her previous novel were disappointed with this one. I wasn’t. Where Girl with a Pearl Earring is controlled, The Lady and The Unicorn is lavish. But it is not less an interesting read. Having read other novelists like Susan Vreeland and Sarah Dunant who have come up with similar novels, I can say that Tracy Chevalier beats them all. Go for it.

Image Source: tchevalier.com

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Other Fiction

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In the Cut by Susanna Moore

August 24th 2006 04:14

Meg Ryan has tired of her cutie-pie roles because her body has outgrown them and picked up Susanna Moore's In The Cut as the magic dress that would fit her body well. The movie quickly tanked and the audience would rather not see this not-so cute Meg banged by Mark Ruffalo. But that's beside the point.

Frannie is a divorced thirty something woman who is living alone in New York. She teaches English when she is not collecting word lists of street vernacular. She also has an ominous-looking student stalking her which she does not seem to bother her. One day in a bar she sees through a curtain of darkness, a redhead giving head to a man with a tattoo. And then the redhead turns up dead. And the man with the tattoo knocks up her door to investigate the death of the redhead. Is it the same man? She is not so sure but she sure does get knocked up by him. And the more she gets she knocked, the more suspicious she gets and the more suspicious she gets, the more her craving for getting knocked by him. This is the danger that we were promised. After all this is a dangerous erotic thriller and everything you know about desire is just dead wrong.

Frannie might be looking for dangerous thrills to frill her sex life but to a cynical mind, she invites Detective James Malloy (that's the guy with the tattoo, if you believe Frannie) repeatedly into her life because his idea of sex is to pleasure the organ, you know the only one made purely for pleasure or so we are told, and to drown in it. Some danger.

Curiously, for a novel written by a woman, Moore inflicts the same fate on her heroine which we thought was practised only by the harsher sex. And the only other notable (and curious) thing about it is how far the novel manages to objectify men.

If you are looking for the erotic or the thrilling, clearly in the cut is not the place to be.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: Thrillers

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If you peel an onion, you find a nazi

August 23rd 2006 03:20

The controversy in the literary world last week was about one of its most famous stars, Gunter Grass admitting that he had been an SS agent in the past. Grass is famous for using Germany as his punching bag, for its collective amnesia for German past excesses. He is also famous for taking those extraordinary positions that only pundits of his kind are able to do: glorifying the prison house that was East Germany, opposing German reunification because it meant that East Germany would become like the West and not the other way round, trashing Ronald Reagan for his visit to a war cemetery that housed SS agents, his former comrades as it turns out. Grass is coming out with a new biography and has decided to use the occasion of its release to issue the obligatory late life mea culpa. The biography is called Peeling The Onion.

It offers a couple of interesting vignettes. He crawled under a Soviet rocket launcher when his unit was fighting the Russians and wet his pants. “I see myself, as I had learned, crawl under the tank…For three minutes, an eternity, the organ played. Beset by fear, I wet myself. Then silence…" Those who are familiar with his The Tin Drum know his fondness for this particular body fluid. It may not have been a sign of fear; you feel the micturating pressure when you are terribly excited too.

When the war ended he was picked up by Americans and released by them after he confessed his SS role. Nobody had bothered to look for the document in the military archives, in itself a symbol of the collective amnesia of Germans that Grass was so found of excoriating. The surrender to the Yankees, the confession—humiliation enough to warrant a lifetime of bitterness.

Who knows? And who can judge? "Anyone who wants to pass judgment can pass judgment," the author says at one place. He lived with this shame for years, he says elsewhere. His greatest fear is that he will be made a persona non grata. Can you detect any shame in these fruit-cakey confessions, in that title of his biography? I can’t. It almost looks like he enjoys this.

The press is suitably apologetic and the big papers like The New York Times have already sounded the bugle of the defensive. The criticism is from the conservatives, The New York Times notes, which probably makes it automatically discredited. But Grass’s past, his long non-disclosure of the facts do not or should not affect how we read his work which is beautiful in itself. I don’t know. If anything, this incident proves that we need a fight against another kind of amnesia. The one against the complicity of the Left with every kind of fundamentalism, whether in the past or the present.

Source : The Times of London

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The Double Eagle by James Twining

August 22nd 2006 03:21

In 1933, in the middle of Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order which removed the gold standard. Hundreds of freshly minted 1933 twenty dollar coins called double eagles were then melted down. Officially, 1933 double eagles were not supposed to exist. But ten survived. James Twining’s new thriller The Double Eagle uses this fact as its plot-theme.
The novel begins with a murder of Paris priest whose body is dumped in the side-by river. Nothing remarkable about the murder except that during autopsy the victim’s stomach yields the rarest of rare coins, the 1933 Double Eagle.
FBI springs into action and the case is handled by Agent Jennifer Browne, an attractive young woman who is struggling to overcome a past judgement error which proved fatal to her career. Her investigation leads to Fort Knox where the ten Double Eagles which escaped melting are stored only to find that all the ten coins are missing. The early suspect is one Tom Kirk, a renegade CIA agent who is now an art thief.
Tom Kirk is introduced to us stealing a Fabourge egg in a nice action set piece. Tom has tired of his stealing ways and wants this to be his last assignment. But his boss, Archie is bound to a shadowy figure named Cassius and will not let him go easily. Cassius could be Van Simmons, a cruel Dutch entrepreneur who is also after the Double Eagles. Or someone else.
Twining doesn’t waste time and moves from one action scene to another with effortless ease pulling us along the way. The wire stunts, and the novel is packed with them, should be mouth-watering to action buffs. The characters are nicely etched and the novel is punctured with delightful humour too. All in all, it makes for a great reading.
James Twining’s next Tom Kirk novel,

is out and will be featured here in future.

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Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

August 21st 2006 04:44

The blurb announces an author with impressive pedigree. Kate Mosse is the co-founder of Orange Prize for Fiction and has a European Woman of Achievement award, so you’d think she’d be able to come up with a decent novel. Except when it comes to writing fiction, it doesn’t help how many prizes you’ve helped to establish.

Labyrinth starts with an archaeological dig at some remote corner of France. Alice Tanner is temping there for her vacation and led by some voice in her head opens up a cave when no one is looking. The cave has a few skeletons, a book, a ring and a labyrinth. Though the skeletons look at least a few centuries old, the local police seizes the site as a crime scene and enter a villainous lawyer, the first among many, whose is after the book and the ring. Soon enough, Alice is drawn into the intrigue.

Meanwhile, Alice’s thirteenth century incarnation Alais, finds a dead body floating in a river. This eventually leads Alais to find out that her father, a steward to the local king, has a secret past. He is one of the group of five sworn to protect the Holy Grail, not a cup but a labyrinth and its secret formula written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and divided into three books. One who collects all the three books and reads aloud the formula over the labyrinth can invoke the magic of the Grail and become immortal.. Meanwhile, the Pope has declared the fourth Crusade, this time on European soil, whose aim is to wipe out Cathars, a Christian sect which resembles Gnostics in many ways. Among the furious host of French army are people who already know the secret of the Grail and will go to any lengths to collect the books and the grail. I don’t see why they bother, seeing every bit player in this set up re-incarnates again and again. While her father battles on to save their city from the advancing Crusade Army, Alais is entrusted with protecting the secret.

Mosse’s descriptive powers are poor and her plotting standard and the big book is filled with only a few scattered minor thrills. She spends inordinate amount of time on inconsequential incidents until she is through to sixty percent of the novel, when she suddenly wakes up to the reality that she has a lot of ground to cover and therefore, brushes off major action and perhaps the only interesting portion of the novel in a few conversations. The only redeeming feature of the novel is that it projects a genuine sense of evil about the Crusades. By the way, the French are the bad guys in this one. Seeing what they are coming up with in L’Affaire Lebanon, that should detract a little from the novel’s many weaknesses.

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