Review of “The Shakespeare Secret”…

In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself for the next clue in the scavenger hunt.

Structurally, it’s built around a vaguely Oxfordian-Stratfordian axis (i.e. whether Shakespeare really was himself or not), with a bit of Delia Bacon thrown in for fun. There are all the obligatory twists and turns at the end (where various players reverse their roles): and it wouldn’t be a proper Shakespearean pastiche-y thing without a bit of cross-dressing along the way, so that happens too. Basically, all the right boxes get ticked in a broadly trashy-secrets-novel-that-you-can-pretend-is-a-bit-posh kind of way.

But there’s a problem.

For me, there’s just something about it which brings so many other novels I’ve reviewed here immediately to mind. For example, its underground finale echoes both Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” and Michael Cordy’s “The Source” (with a bit of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum thrown in for good measure), while the book’s whole scavenger hunt motif has a parochial American angle to it (not unlike Lev Grossman’s “Codex”, which I’ll be reviewing soon).

Really, to me it’s as if these books are all reprising a single High Victorian cipher Ur-romp: but not even in a syncretic “Hero of a Thousand Faces” / Joseph Campbell way. Put them all together, and it feels as though you can perhaps begin to redraw the vague outlines of ye olde booke from whence they all flowed: and it goes something like this…

The main character begins the book in a kind of liminal state, floating between academe and pragmatism (but committed to neither). Yet he/she is quickly presented with a challenge arising from his/her personal life, which compels him/her to use apply both his/her mad research skillz and practical nous to a mysterious enciphered / obscured object. After an almost-interminable scavenger hunt across a number of locations (snooty rare book and manuscript libraries, draughty museums, improbably fantastic or rich archives, and odd church basements), chased by unconvincing (and frankly two-dimensional) protagonists who seem to have escaped from a penny dreadful, the main character realises the awful truth about both the codex / book and the agenda(s) of the people who have steered / guided / manipulated him/her to find it. However, despite being finally found in some underground location (with an unconvincing fight sequence whereby the truly evil character dies), for some mysterious reason the codex ultimately slips through the main character’s grasp, and (to nobody’s great surprise) a new optimistic chapter of his/her life finally opens up, with all that murky nonsense placed safely behind.

I’m not a historian of the novel, so I really wouldn’t know where to begin digging to find a (early Victorian? or slightly older?) prototypical cipher romp, where this basic template first appeared. It’s superficially tempting to see things like the liminality of the main character as a modern conceit: but actually, it all feels far older to me. Perhaps someone will recognize it and add a comment…