A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn’t a ‘crowd’, but (rather delightfully) a ‘murder‘ of crows.
What, I wonder then, would be the right collective term for a set of Voynich novels? Though I’ve settled for “an obfuscation” here, doubtless you’ll have your own ideas. 🙂
Anyway, here are five relatively new Voynich novels I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a short while…
* (2011) The Cadence of Gypsies – Barbara Casey
“On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written in an unknown language left to her by her birth mother. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.”
* (2012) The Book of Blood & Shadow – Robin Wasserman
“Desperate to prove [her boyfriend Max’s] innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine…”
* (2012) Vaults of Power – Diane Echer
“When her twin is kidnapped in Southern France, Robyn Gabriel has six days to steal the precious Voynich manuscript from a bunker-like library at Yale University and break its code– […] The Federal Reserve can’t allow that. Now, they want her dead.”
* (2011) In a Celandine World – Catherine Thorpe
“The truth is going to come out. A truth that has long been forgotten. A truth that was concealed in a manuscript in the 12th century. An impossible truth. A dangerous truth that will blow Willow’s secret wide open—leaving her scrambling to save the only man she could ever love.”
* (2012?) The Voynich Cypher – Russell Blake [announced but not yet released]
“When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptologist living in Tuscany, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history’s most enigmatic documents…”
I already have the first two to read & review, though I must confess I’m finding it difficult to get into the Cadence of Gypsies, possibly because it’s aimed at a Teen / Young Adult audience. Oh well – I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck! 🙂
Incidentally, I just noticed that the ebook version of In a Celandine World is free at SmashWords until February 15th 2012, so if you’d like to be entertained by Catherine Thorpe’s Victorian Knot-garden-inspired time-shifting paranormal Voynich romance, feel just as free to click on the link! 🙂
There are novels; and there are novel ideas. Sometimes the novelty can wear off. As far as “knot gardens” go, however, I’d like to mention Tepenez”s possible contribution to the Vms. My understanding was that Tepenez was King Rudolph’s botanist/gardens manager?
“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye –
four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie……
Ekshully, the bird behavior you observed is similar to what goes on in my “back yard”. Here, we have blue jays, stellar jays, and acorn woodpeckers. All three predate on each other’s eggs and hatchlings (when they’re not digging into each others caches/stashes).
If you are interest in a lighter-hearted story of crow behavior, lemmeno. I still grin every time I reminisce.
To continue the “nursery” rhyme: ,,, When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,
Now wasn’t that a pretty dish to set before the King.
The King was in his counting house counting out his money,
The Queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden hanging up the
clothes.
Along came a blackbird and snipped off her
nose!
Nursery rhyme, joke, or “code”? (Don’t stick your nose into other persons business. In this case Royal business and intrigue. Heh!)
bdid1dr: not exactly, Sinapius / de Tepenecz was the Imperial Distiller – he created a health-giving aqua vitae much admired by Emperor Rudolf, as I recall. Not sure how much of an interest in botany that would entail! All the same, the point of the “In a Celandine World” was to ‘big up’ the gardening parallels: if you like time-shifted paranormal romances with a bit of Voynichian art history, it should press all your buttons… 🙂
Novel idea, thanks to Nick. A group of renegade templars have refused to return after the expedition under wosname, the awful chap. So they hop a ship to China from Aden, and then become heirs to the mysterious oriental-type mysteries of Zeng He, which are encoded in a map or two. However, on hearing that all record of his journeys will be destroyed (already catalogued by fiendish-type librarian Moire d’Arty, concubine to the emperor – that’s for the obligatory bed-scene, you understand), they have but a couple of hours to copy the logbook of Zeng-He’s Jewish-Rosicrucian-Coptic secretary-and-navigator. (Whew). To get past the soldiers with flaming brands, they overpaint the telling Manchu-type headwear to resemble fashions back home. This occurs in the1400s, and their heirs slowly make their way overland for the next three hundred years (It will be bigger than the Forsyte saga).. the last, sole, lone, heroic survivor of the secret brotherhood making his way to Rudolf in order to lay the book at the feet of the emperor and beg forgiveness for abandoning wossname the’orrible all those years before. Rudolf thanks same, and has him paid handsomely (by someone else) but hasn’t the heart to tell the poor chap that actually Europeans made it round the horn while he and his ancestors were slowly trudging through the Taklamakan, and being waylaid by charming maidens etc.
What do you think? I could throw in some Manichaeans, and Wing-chun types, and even a detour to the Purple Cloud Palace. Yep. a saga ’tis to be sure.
Diane: yeah – I’m seeing Sean Connery as the renegade Templar Grand Master, Jackie Chan as Zheng He, Eva Green as the fiendish librarian, Geoffrey Rush as Emperor Rudolf… how can it not
failsucceed? 🙂yes, yes, *two* hundred years.
Well, sure, if I can sell the film rights without bothering with the actual author-work, sure. Peasy.
Sad you cannot think of anyone under 50 for the roles. its a flexible plot. We could accomodate vampires, UFOs, shamanic experiences and hyper-advanced secret technologies .. it’s all do-able. Just no girly tantrum scenes. I can’t write them convincingly.
Diane: perhaps you are mixing up Eva Green with Eva Braun? ;-p Hehehehe!
i.e. not
( ^^) _U~~
Nick
Don’t have a current email address for you – would like permission to do a pastiche of your codicology comments on my blogs (with links of course). Unless you’d care to contribute a guest post? But I expect you are too busy preparing your talk for the conference. Just thought I’d ask.
Diane: the email you have works fine, it’s just that I tend to batch up replies – basically, I have too many non-cipher-mysteries-related things to deal with on a day-to-day basis here. 🙁
Sinapius de Tepenezc — distiller, aqua vitae?
I just now “lost” the word for various patent medicines that were popular in the “Victorian era. Many had a good measure of poppy distillation.
Honest, I’m not obsessed with “dope” of any kind, nor do I even smoke cigarettes any more (quit cold-turkey on my 40th b’day, 28 years ago).
Also, I do remember the “bidi’s” our boys were bringing home from Vietnam — wicked vicious stuff. I also remember the bags of “laundry” that were being sent home from Japan when the boys had rec/leave. And then there were the flimsy boxes of Japanese “costume dolls” that the boys sent home to their female relatives. I worked the sorting belt at Ferry Annex (SFCalif). The customs inspector sat at my elbow while I lifted each box and estimated the weight. If it felt heavier than it should, I left it on the belt for him to judge or toss into the mailbags.
I know, I’m probably “off-topic” here, but those were “trying times” to say the least. The saddest, most disturbing events of all, while I worked the belt, were the days when two or three truckloads of “garbage” would be decanted onto the belt. Large “balls” of sodden, crumbling cardboard would be leaking cookie crumbs, Kool-aid, melted chocolate candy bars, Fritos, corn chips, popcorn …… Each “ball” would have a minimum of 4 stamps on it: “Return to Sender — Deceased”
One last, brief, look at current events in Afghanistan and their poppy fields. Actually, there is more interest in their deposits of minerals and “rare earths” that are now up for bids from countries who have developed advanced technologies. So, d’y think “poppies” popularity may eventually be “undermined”?
…”collective term for a set of Voynich novels”:
A “merry-go-round”?
A “ferris-wheel”?
The “murder” of crows I watched from the window of my hillside house could only have been playing, one very windy day several years ago. They caught my eye because there was a constant stream of about a dozen birds landing one after the other on a low-hanging branch of my oak tree. As soon as one would land, it would hop to a higher branch that extended over the downhill, upwind slope. Each bird, in turn, would repeat the same moves until they reached the uppermost, overhanging branch — and hurl themselves into the wind which would loft them another 10 or 15 feet into the free-flight zone. They would travel the wind, in single-file, in a large circle until they were once again being carried back to the the “landing-pad” branch.
When I returned to my mundane chores a good 40 minutes or so later, they were still playing.