The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
September 13th 2006 04:00
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club is set in post-civil war America crawling with Irish immigrants and rife with tensions of newly released slaves. H.W.Longfellow intends to publish the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and forms a Dante Club with a few other Dante enthusiasts— writer Holmes, poet Lowell and historian Greene, to assist him in the matter. However, Harvard Corporation, the board of the university is trying hard to stop the publication of the translation. As if that’s not bad enough, a series of bizarre murders is taking place in Boston and the trio of the Dante Club (excluding Greene), together with their publisher Fields, realises that the murders are all staged according to punishments handed out it in Dante’s Inferno. If that gets well-known, their project will be doomed and Dante will forever be besmirched in America. To stop that from happening, they decide to find the killer themselves.
Pearl has a wonderful knack of using real life elements in his fiction and this comes to the fore in the novel. The Dante Club was real and many of the incidents and people described in the novel are taken from real life and it is a pleasure to keep bumping into a Ralph Waldo Emerson or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. The writing is top-class and though the book is harder to read than your average mystery, it is also much better than your average mystery.
It is frequently said of Dante that his Lucifer is a big disappointment compared to Milton’s Satan. Our detective team calls their killer Lucifer and he too disappoints big time. The novel is divided into three parts and all through the first two, the author raises big issues and Dante is used as some kind of a window to these and then in the final part, the plot turns on itself and you find out that those issues were just a smokescreen and the question is not what Dante has to say but Dante himself.
Pearl has said that the novel deals with the nature of punishment, a grave moral matter anytime and a particularly poignant one for our times. But it is a little ridiculous to find that the punishment is to be handed out to the philistines who are not so hot about the culture you are fond of. Matthew Pearl wrote a college thesis on Dante and this novel reads like a fantasy he might have had during the writing of that thesis. The fantasy of holding to book all those who had hindered or opposed the march of Dante. The list of those villains is large and when the Lucifer Mr. Pearl has dreamed up is no longer sufficient for the purpose, he feeds the others to sharks himself. The narcissism of discipleship.
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