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

Postmortem

May 23rd 2007 07:32

Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell

Postmortem was the first Patricia novel, which immediately turned her into queen of crime fiction by seeling in millions and winning tons of awards. It won Edgar, John Creasey, Anthony, MacAvity and the Prix du Roman awards in one year. Impressive for any novel, mega incredible for a first novel. According to the blurb, it's still the only novel to do so.

The novel introduces Kay Scarpetta who is the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. Some people have compared her even to Sherlock Holmes. I do not think the comparision applies. Kay's knowledge is professional, Holmes is an amateur who observes a whole lot of things. Whereas Holmes has a certain glamour, Kay lacks personality. Most of her memes, a woman who is getting older, a woman in a powerful job etc are generic. Cornwell fails to flesh out her heroine and add any personal touches to her. She is humourless but even her grimness is generic not a recognisable character trait. It doesn't help matters either that the novel is written in first person. Kay's obervations tend to be factual, she doesn't venture out opinion often. Not only Kay but the entourage around her too are dull. I am particularly irritated by her niece Lucy and a police officer friend Merino.

But, if Kay is uninteresting, Cornwell is not. Cornwell has intimate knowledge of the subject she is talking about and she makes clinical pathology sexy. She actually built the pathology thriller froma scratch which a lot of CSI like clones tend to imitate. Every Cornwell novel gets into form when Scarpetta is cutting open bodies or teasing out evidence. Cornwell's dry surgical prose builds tension like a charm.

Postmortem falls into the bracket of early novels where Cornwell had no problems with her art. She later began employing present tense and third person for her novels and giving more and more space to Lucy and Merino. She also began being caught up in the drama of of her own charcaters that she started mythologising them. I think this is a problem for any franchise, we all want to know backstories but she fundamentally replaced the realist crime-solving plots with unbelievable conspiracies and over the top action. Postmortem thankfully suffers from no such flaws.

It is a simple crime thriller. A series of women have been killed but there appears to be no MoD, they are apaprently random. Scarpetta suspects that there is a serial killer at loose but his motives remain unclear. This is not a whodunit, so the identity of the killer is nearly not as improtant as the process of finding him. It is to Cornwell's credit that she makes the investigations fraught with chilly suspense. The motive of the serial killer is very clever.

I read Postmortem after I had read a lot of other Cornwell books. It surprised me because in her other books, Cornwell is sparer and drier. Postmortem is filled with emotive language. I enjoyed it more because of that.

Cornwell's latest Scarpetta adventure The Book of the Dead is going to release this year and hope she gets back to form.

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The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Haining

May 22nd 2007 07:22

Before Harry Potter and Star Wars there was another franchise which had acquired maniacal fandom. I am talking, of course, about Sherlock Holmes. It is said Conan Doyle himself did not enjoy his creation and killed him in a fit of irritation. It is well-known that fan pressure made him write a comeback for his detective. For some fans, even that was not enough.

Sherlock Holmes collections usually have 4 novels and 56 short stories. According to Peter Haining, the guy who edited this book there are many more Sherlock Holmes stories and his mission is to collect them in one volume. Sherlock stories nobody ever heard of? Sounds promising doesn't it?

But the promise is horribly undone as soon as you read the introduction. It contains two preliminary sketches that the author made before he could conceptualise Homes and Watson pair completely, two essays which the author wrote to explain his hero, two parodies of his own creation, two short stories in which Holmes plays an incidental role and a poem where the author tries to disassociate himself from the Sherlockian view of life. The two full-fledged cases are of disputed authorship and there are two plays which Doyle co-wrote with somebody else.

It's a collection for die-hard fans who want to grab every scrap of paper on which Holmes name is written and there are legions of such fans, I am sure. I am not one of them. I did enjoy some stories of Holmes but for some reason have never been an ardent fan. I appreciate the romanticism and the atmospheric prose of Doyle but not all of his plots are of equal quality. Some of them are just pure bragging and the whole professor Moriarty episode was a joke (at least Agatha Christie would do The Big Four kind of novels, her tongue firmly in cheek). Still, I wouldn't mind reading new set of detective stories but to read parodies of Sherlock Holmes even when written by Conan Doyle himself? Not for me.

The editor gushes in with schoolboy enthusiasm about how all these pieces are necessary to understand the genius of Sherlock Holmes and they form the canon too. Yeah? Any such collections should be given as a bonus, clearly stating that they are not canon and are offered for the elucidation of fans. Ayn Rand fans or J.K. Rowling fans are more careful regarding such things. The whole matter of rushing to canonise every bit of Sherlock Holmes Doyle ever managed to scribble is what is so irritating about this book. Sherlock fans should take a leaf out of Harry Potter fans and start writing fanfiction.

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The Year of the Cobra by Paul Doherty

March 20th 2007 13:13

I finished this novel last week while commuting though I am kind of mystified why I did not get down to review it earlier than today. Anyways, Paul Doherty's The Year of The Cobra is set in one of the most scrumptious periods of human history--the end days of Thutmosid Dynasty. I love this period. Remember this is the time of Egyptians and Hittites, the Sea peoples, Moses and Exodus and the arrival of fascinating peoples like Hebrews, Phoenicians and Philistines onto the stage of human history. Suffice it to say that any novel set in this period will gain my attention for that reason alone.

The Year of The Cobra is the last of the trilogy, the earlier novels supposedly deal with Akhenhaten and other intriguing figures like Nefertiti. I never got to read them and started with the third and realised that it was supposed to be part of a trilogy only after half way through.

The novel is narrated by Mahu, a spy chief in Pharoah's court, also Tutankhamen's guardian. As it opens, Egypt is facing some dark times. The renegade pharoah Akhehaten has disappeared and Tutankhamen is young and inexperienced and the court is awash with intrigue. Meanwhile, Hittites under their chief, Suppiliulama are massing in the north and threatening to march over Canaan. Mahu is sent to Tyre on a mission.

He is deeply troubled to leave Tutankhamen behind but leaves for his mission along with his Apiru( Hebrew sidekick) Djarka. Mahu also has a secret mission, he wants to find out what happened to Akhenhaten, who according to rumours was hiding somewhere in Canaan. And even before he sets foot on his journey, he gets mysetrious messages.

It should take lot of skill to twist sketchily known historical facts into a coherent plot and Paul does a neat job of it. The novel reads smoothly and Paul's solutions to the many puzzles of the era are interesting.

Still, there are a few downsides. For most of the novel, Mahu is passive. For an allegedly spy chief, his thinking is almost done by others, either by Djarka his assistant or his wife Nabila. There is no sense of Sherlock Holmes kinda aura either. At no time, we are told that Mahu already knew what his sidekicks were speculating before him, a la Sherlock Holmes. So, the passivity of the hero is just that, passivity; it's not redeemed later in the novel. All through the beginning, we are told of an assassin in Mahu's group but this plot point is forgotten in the denouement.

The biggest disappointment for me, which I don't think is the author's fault, is that it is filled with rather crude violence which kind of took away the romantic sheen of this era. The violence did not bother me but the dingy portrayal and the failure to add richness, colour and depth to these intriguing civilizations were big downers for me.

All in all, a very nice way of spending time.

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The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

January 4th 2007 09:05

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

This was the book that came with a million dollar advance, a Hollywood contract, the marketing blitz lesser mortals can only dream of and an author who looks as if she’s made for a reprise of Dallas. The Historian is Elizabeth Kostova’s vampire novel. It is based on Vlad Tepis, the Wallachian prince, the real figure behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula character.

As tyrants go, Tepis has a middling record. He has killed around 20,000 of his own people, the book quotes at some point. Considering Saddam gassed hundreds of thousands and he has millions of fans who still think he’s some kind of martyr, 20,000 looks cheap. Vlad, you’re small fry, mate.

Vlad Tepes, The Real Dracula

The story or what passes for it, is this. A young girl finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father’s library. Her father is scared at first but then launches into his story of how he first found the book in his college days and how since then, Dracula had become his obsession. He was studying under a professor called Rossi who tells him that he had found a similar book that made him interested in Dracula too and that Dracula might be alive. It transpires that many historians have got the same present and Dracula might be luring historians.

This kind of terror setup reminds one Anne Radcliffe’s type of Gothic novel where everything will be explained at the end. But the book takes a dubious dip into the supernatural in the climax and cheats us of even that small satisfaction. As a terror novel, maybe it would have worked in the age of Boris Karloff. Most of the information about Vlad Tepes presented in this novel can be more simply gleaned from this website. How does Kostova then fill her tome? By adding more information about each and every secondary topic-- the fifteenth-century East European towns, the Turkish- European clashes etc etc—and spacing her chase toward a limp climax in every one of those dismal towns.

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The Disappearance of Odile by Georges Simenon

November 17th 2006 07:23

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon has a huge cult following for his Inspector Maigret series and has made a huge impact on French cinema. Around thirty of his novels have been made into movies.

I have read around 15 to 20 Simenon novels myself. I don't like Maigret and sometimes the Maigret novels can get too wishy washy and I stopped reading them after I read one particularly pitiful example. Nevertheless, there is one novel of Simenon which I prize as one of the most effective novels written on teenage angst ever.

The Disappearance of Odile is about Odile, a teenager who runs away from home with the vague notion of a suicide. She comes from a dysfunctional family and her parents couldn't care less. It is her elder brother who is studying sociology in colleger who starts searching for her. The novel mostly describes the young man's rookie search for his sister.

It is interesting that today we almost club American together with the words "dysfunctional family" whereas a century ago, the French were being excoriated for it. It actually shows the middle-class and upper-class bashing by the stiff lip liberals. This was going on in every country, in France, in Russia at the turn of the century. Before any nomads ruled a town they captured, they first erased the older inhabitants. It is clear then that if a liberal state has to erected then the resisting classes have to dehumanised.

After a century of relentless dehumanisation by its artists who paved the way for the revolutionaries, every society had fallen and given in, except of course America. Curiously, America was a newcomer to this treatment and as it fell to America to halt the onward march of our brothers, America recieved this treatment in spades. It is worth noting that Simenon modeled his detective in explicit contra-distinction to the American detective prototype (ya know the cigar chewing, foul mouthed, gun-happy, moralistic Humphrey Bogart types).

Simenon's novels then, most of them anyway are an attempt to simlutaneously dehumanise the upper classes and sympathising or understanding "society's rejects". Usual libaloney. I gave up reading him when he pressed on with this agenda at the expense of readabilit and his unique style of writing had no more surprises for me.

Unlike his other novels though, Simenon prevents this from becoming another bourgeoise-bashing novel by working in the perimeters of his theme. Simenon has this unique ability to convey vast pscychological truth through simple means and his technique comes in handy in this novel.

It tears open the mind of a teenager who is beset with bordeom, has nothing to do in life and wants to commit suicide. There are many like that and we can palpably touch the inside of such a brain. Sad for the most part, it ends on a hopeful note. A necessary read.

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The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

November 16th 2006 06:47

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I won't presume to dissect what lies behind the runaway success of The Da Vinci Code but it launched a certain kind of thriller and made it a cottage industry and that's our concern. This thriller takes up a work of art or a religious icon and weaves its intrigue around it. According to some, it is an indication to take Western culture seriously. According to others, it is symbolic of decreasing imagination.

I myself wrote that "the extraordinary success of these novels might be indicative of the fact that we are out of Cold War and farther and farther from it. No longer under threat of nuclear destruction, we want our heroes not to stop bombs in the hands of rogue nations but find a missing Caravaggio painting or the Holy Grail and increase our aesthetic education or make us immortal."

I will hold to my view that this is a post-Cold War thriller but there's at least more to it than that, at least to The Da Vinci Code. Curiously, that came across in The Last Templar, another Brown clone. In a revealing moment, that novel says that the fall of Communism was affected not by Ronald Reagan but by Pope John Paul II !

The end of Cold War did away with the Kremlin but the bugbear of all liberals, the Catholic Church, was still there. The communist dictaorship had fallen but the old religion it promised to wipe away was still there and flourishing. Imagine what it must do to the mind of a liberal ! If there were only a secret that could bring down this huge monstrosity, a spiritual government that commands the loyalty of a billion people, why, our hero must find that secret.

The Da Vinci Code is born out of such a conceit. Richard Langdon is again woken up in the middle of his sleep and yanked off this time to Paris, where another bizarre murder has taken place in Louvre. The murdered has pointed to Leonardo da Vinci'd paintings as clues and it is for our symbologist to crack them.

Dan Brown peels away the flab and self-indulgence that marred his Angels and Demons and achieves a highly readable thriller. Only problem is he does not have a convincing villain and if you are a good suspense fiend, you probably can smell the culprit two pages after he is introduced. It also does not help that Brown builds his plot on a very old and a very stale conspiracy theory. But, probably, that's why the novel became such a hit.

You can find my other post on these thrillers here.

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Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

November 15th 2006 06:07

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

After trashing Republicans in his first two novels, Dan Brown turned to another pet target, the Catholic church in his Angels and Demons, the novel which originally introduced his Harvard symbologist hero Robert Langdon. Brown would not become famous until his second Robert Langdon novel The Da Vinci Code became an international blockbuster but looking back it is hard to argue that Angels and Demons is the better novel of the two and his best novel to date.

In the opening scenes, Brown plugs like hell for CERN and probbaly he felt that it was a bit too much, so he plugs a little more in a fatuous prologue. Anyway, a physicist there has been murdered and a graffiti of the Illuminati is written across his chest. Robert Langdon is the professor of symbology and has written a book on the Illuminati, a centuries old secret group which has pledged revenge on the Catholic Church. And a tiny device developed by CERN has been stolen, something to do with anti-matter and stuff, a device which can set a huge controlled explosion.

Elsewhere in the world, the old Pope has kicked the bucket and they are holding elections for the next one. It becomes immediately clear that the anti-matter device is somewhere in the Vatican. Not only all the top contenders for the post of the Pope are going to be killed, one each per hour, each one in a different church. Rome is full of churches, so it difficlut to stop these murders.

This sets up the scavenger hunt, as only Robert can unravel the clues as to where the next murder is going to take place. This is the best portion of the book but dries up a little too soon. A hundred and fifty pages before the end of the novel, the Vatican is in turmoil as these murders come to light and it falls to one man to manage it all and here, Brown loses the plot. The book becomes giddy, overwrought and unsuspenseful.

The legends of the Illuminati which read the same backwards and forwards, recreated here are cool. The action is exicting for the most part too. The good thing about this book is that Brown manages to weave in a lot of his information into a dense plot and both feed off on each other. It also helps that the information is not facile and does not feel like you've read it all somewhere before as in The Da Vinci Code.

Curiously enough, until the other book became a success, nobody noticed this one. But, if part of success is to bring deserving readership to adeserving books, then the wide success of The Da Vinci Code has accomplished at least something good.

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Shall We Tell The President? by Jeffrey Archer

November 2nd 2006 05:11

Shall We Tell The President? by Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer's neat little thriller Shall we tell the President? follows the fortunes of Florentyna Kane, the newly elected first woman president of the United States. Florentyna first appeared as a side character in Archer's iconic Kane and Abel. Archer then gave her a full-length novel The Prodigal Daughter, wherein she was at a hair's breadth from becoming the President. Tise novel opens with her inauguration as the President

When an illegal immigrant is shot in the leg and requests to talk with the head of FBI, two agents are sent to the hospital. The man tells them of a plot to assassinate the President and very quickly one of the agents and thier boss are murdered and so is the informant. It falls to the other agent Mark Andrews to foil the assassination attempt.

Now, here is the problem I have with this novel. The informant was an illegal immigrant from Greece who waited at a table, because the people had asked for a waiter who didn't know English. Our man could not speak English but could very much understand it. So, when the conspirators gab on about their supposed plan in the earshot of the waiter, the plot kicks off. I know we need an informant but why in the heck will people converse about an assassination attmept in a hotel room after asking for a waiter?

After this uncovincing start, the novel pretty much develops into a high-octane chase to catch the conspirators including a senator. Archer is a Tory and he has that fascicantion of noticing how things are done and fills the novel with many little details about ceremonies, status and power. But this is one lean book and our interest never flags for a moment. In fact, I read this novel in one sitting.

Not one of Archer's best but a very entertaining novel.

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The Oracle by Valerio Manfredi

October 24th 2006 02:08

Valerio Manfredi's The Oracle

Valerio Manfredi came into prominence with his Alexander novels which, for me at least, were unreadable. There's something with Alexander though; even Mary Renault foundered on him. So, Manfredi has joined the new thriller bandwagon and produced The Oracle.

The action starts in Greece when the military is taking over the universities. Heleni is the outspoken student leader who is in love with Claudio and they are part of a group of friends including Norman and Michel. When Heleni is killed and the friends betray her, you know you're being set up for I know what you did last summer kind of thing. Their fate is also tied up with a mysterious Mycenaean find which supposedly depicts the last voyage of Ulysses.

Flash forward to 10 years when Michel is a professor in the university. One by one the old players are being killed in a way that suggests a connection to mystic Greek rite. Michel and Norman, newly reunited, have to solve the mystery before they are made targets of vengeance too.

Like all the novels of its kind, it is sporadically interesting only when it talks about bygone eras and exotic rituals. Manfredi, fortunately, is a scholar in ancient Greece and what he has to offer is make for a good reading. Otherwise, plotting is slipshod and writing even worse.

Or maybe because I have read so many of these kind of novels in the last two months that I am so cruel with this one. Like The Geographer's Library, Labyrinth and their ilk, this one too has at its centre the issue of immortality. Only the immortal here is Ulysses who has survived the tortures Homer had planned for him in The Odyssey and here has become the punisher.

And Manfredi uses this immortal punisher, with just the right touch of violence (neither less nor more), to punish all those evil military colonels and foreign diplomats (for once just British not American) who had stopped the glorious revolution in the university, in its tracks.

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The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury

September 26th 2006 07:42

I think my post yesterday was quite lame so I think I should meekly return to what we used to do earlier: write book reviews which no one reads. My brother for one tells me to stick to books; you’re going after cheap sensationalism, he says. I admit I did like to be in spotlight for a change (four of my posts were hanging in the popular posts at one time) but I wasn’t going after cheap sensationalism. I want it on record.

To books then. I almost feel like its my wyrd, karma or fate, whatever. The book I had been casually reading the whole weekend turned out to be more germane to what I’d wanted to say all along. So we’ll probably rip it apart and eat it for a few posts at least.

The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury is not the sort of book I typically enjoy. I don’t care if the holy grail was some fat prostitute Jesus slept with or some alchemical concoction that will make you immortal. I can barely get through one life as it is. And man, do I hate templars. They come only next to King Arthur and the Round Table shit in the sucking order.

The book opens with a cinematic scene where Saracens are defeating Christian army and taking over Jerusalem. The templars know they are about to lose, so one of them is pulled out from the melee and entrusted with a secret letter.

Cut to the present. The Vatican has arranged a show of its best art collections at the Met and four horse riders dressed as medieval knights barge into the show, destroy whatever they can and scoot off with a strange looking device. One of the horsemen murmurs “Veritas Vos liberabit” in Latin which is heard by Tess Chaykin, an archaeologist in the crowd. FBI agent Reilly is on the job, who is soon tipped off by Tess that the whole thing might be about Templars.

The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury

The early action is vivid and you think you have a nice read on your hands. But Khoury’s thin as a noodle plot vaporizes after a few chapters and the novel becomes endlessly preachy. The grail here is an apocryphal Gospel of Jesus which supposedly admits that Jesus was not Son of God but just a plain ol’carpenter, a social revolutionary of his time. The Catholic Church has been trying to suppress this earth-shattering secret for thousands of years and now that its revealed all the religions in the world (Jews, Muslims and Christians, I suppose other religion do not count) will stop fighting among themselves and live happily forever. Oh, for chrissakes!

Hopeless drivel as this is, it still redeems itself a little in the ending when it is revealed that the document in question was doctored by the templars to achieve just such an end and the novel doubts its own “Only Connect” spirit. I said the redemption is only a little because before that the spirited and scientific minded heroine actually gives up the chance to decipher the document because it would shatter the faith of so many millions of people. If only she had decided to take up the task and then found out that it was a forgery, then the redemption would have been big.

We’re done with the book. For now. We’ll start ranting about religion, politics and stuff soon.

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What is your favorite Agatha Christie novel?

September 22nd 2006 02:09

Agatha Christie

She has written over 80 novels, each one of them different from the last one. They all have inventive plots, some of them are so original they have never been surpassed till now. She has laid the standard of writing a mystery story and no one after her has come even close. She was a radically conservative woman who could dissect evil and bare it to its bones.

Over the years, I have read almost all Agatha Christie's fiction barring a few plays and a few odd novels. The Crooked House, her favourite novel was the first Christie I read. It’s also I think one of her best.

The Hollow is another perennial favourite. Hallowe’en Party is short on mystery but like The Hollow, its basic premise goes much deeper than just to engineer a surprise at the end of the novel. They are Christie at her philosophical best.

The ABC Murders is one of the first novels to feature the idea of a serial killer. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is supposed to be her best mystery. It was the first novel that shot her into prominence. I did not like it that much. Mrs. Mcginty’s Dead and Towards Zero are both lush novels rich with incident. So is A Murder for Christmas.

And there is And Then There Were None. A work defying descriptions.

Of her plays, Verdict was a commercial failure but I think it is her best work. Here she dissects the soul of a well-intentioned bleeding heart altruist. It’s not a mystery but it’s an eye opener. The Unexpected Guest is the play she wrote to come back from the failure of The Verdict and what a success it was. Full of surprises and deeply romantic. Who knew theatre could be so thrilling?

The Mousetrap is one play I haven’t read yet. I’ll catch the longest running play in the history of theatre when I go to London one day.

Her short stories are less effective for me, maybe because I don’t like short stories in general.

So, what is your favourite Christie? Please leave your comments.

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The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomas

September 19th 2006 05:55

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomas

I know I have been writing about nothing but fantasies and Dan Brown clones lately, but I want to clear the field before going to higher things. Sadly, the backlog never seems to end.

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomas arrived in that high season when The Da Vinci Code became a super duper seller. The rest of the clones were yet in the making and The Rule of Four was the first to capitalize on the success of Dan Brown. So much so that it has its own clones in the making like Codex.

The authors: Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomas

The novel is set in Princeton where a group of students are working on their theses and the novel’s conspiracies are all university-type conspiracies: snarling academics backstabbing each other for a piece of evidence to prove that some obscure 15th century artist was not a nobleman but an artisan’s son, geeky students vacillating that their professors and fellow students are stealing their ideas and not to forget, nude Olympics. This last would have been a happy event to watch if this were a movie but its just a book and well, don’t get your hopes high.

Paul is working on a book called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an obscure Renaissance tome and tries to get his friend Tom interested in the project. Tom’s dad too was mad about the book and eventually died in the search to unlock its mysteries, so Tom is wary about it. Paul works on it on it like a madman and Tom intermittently but both figure out how to read the very puzzling book and finally figure out its secret.

Unlike Codex, The Rule of Four bases its plot on a real book, not an invented one. The novel is interesting when the authors take us through the labyrinth of this enigmatic book and explain its features to us but fails to build any momentum in any other department. And after all the frenetic searching, one arrives at the climax only to have a most stock-in-trade hypothesis put to us and that’s a big downer. The library of Alexandria? Pfff…….

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The Black Sun by James Twining

September 15th 2006 03:33

James Twining’s second novel The Black Sun is also the second in series to feature Tom Kirk. After the adventures in The Double Eagle, Kirk has shunned his art robbery ways and has become a decent citizen. Now, he uses his expertise to recapture stolen artifacts. Same thing as before, one might say, but on the other side of the fence.

The Black Sun by James Twining

The novel starts with the murder of an Auschwitz survivor whose arm is sawed off and taken as a trophy. On the other side, Tom and his friend Mario are called to investigate the theft of a few virtually unknown painter. The theft is remarkable only because similar thefts have been attempted and it is clear someone is desperately trying to lay hands on the painting.

It is not long before MI5 ( or is it 6?) comes knocking on tom’s doors. Since the book is written by a British guy, you find a touch of condescension toward CIA and a little glorification of MI5. Soon, the sawed off arm turns up in the fridge of Tom Kirk and the dead guy may not have been an Auschwitz
survivor after all, but a member of the one of the most elite orders of Hitler’s army. That’s funny because when I was reading this novel, Gunther Grass laid bare the skeletons in his cupboard. It turns out that before doing the suicide act, Hitler had sent away his most elite order on secret mission to hide a train, yes a train full of valuable treasures and now, half of the world is after it.

James Twining Source:jamestwining.com

In The Black Sun, Twining makes strides in his plotting, which is more elaborate and complex than in his first novel. The action moves fast enough and the set pieces are very well-etched. But the problem with the novel is its hero. If Kirk was bland in the first book, he is so colourless in this one that even minor characters come off more strongly than him. Maybe in the next novel,Twining should work a bit more on his hero.

One more thing. The cover of the hardcover edition with a humungous black cross does nothing to whet your appetite to read this book. Better cover designs would help the next time around.

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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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