Here’s a little cipher (semi-)mystery for you. The 20th century poet Edwin Morgan was so taken by the emerging world of computers that in 1949 he started collecting together files / scrapbooks of cybernetics clippings and notes. Given that, once Morgan began his concrete poetry phase in 1962, it was somehow natural that he would gravitate towards computer-generated (or at least computer-mediated) poems.

He eventually wrote “The Computer’s First Code Poem” in 1968 (note that a couple of letterpairs are swapped relative to the very first published version of this poem):

TEYZA PRQTP ZSNSX OSRMY VCFBO VJSDA
XSEVK JCSPV HSMCV RFBOP OZQDW EAOAD
TSRVY CFEZP OXFRV PTFEP FRXAE OFVVA
HFOPK DZYJR TYPPA PVYBT OAZYJ UAOAD
VEQBT DEQJZ WSZZP WSRWK UAEYU LYSRV
HYUAX BSRWP PIFQZ QOYNA KFDDQ PCYYV
BQRSD VQTSE TQEVK FTARX VSOSQ BYFRX
TQRXQ PVEFV LYZVP HSEPV TFBQP QHYYV
VYUSD TYVVY PVSZZ PCYJP FRDFV QYEVQ
PJQBT CYFES JQSZP QTTQZ DQRQZ VQUSP
TFRWP VCEYJ TZQSR JYEXP QOYFV XCYJP
MCYPV CQSWF AUSVP QTSRM GYYSX VQUSP

The literary trick here is that, even though this apes the layout of WWII cipher messages, the plaintext is actually a sequence of five letter English words, i.e. concrete words trapped inside the cipher cage:

prole snaps livid bingo thumb twice
dirty whist fight numbs black rebec
pinto hurls bdunt spurs under butte
fubsy clown posse stomp below xebec
tramp crawl kills kinky xerox joint
foxed minks squal above yucca shoot
manic tapir party upend tibia mound
panda strut jolts first pumas afoot
toxic potto still shows uncut aorta
swamp houri wails appal canal taxis
punks throw plain words about dhows
ghost haiku exits aping zooid taxis

Endearingly, Cryptocrack isn’t quite able to solve this, swapping v and x around in the cipher alphabet (it probably didn’t have “XEROX” in its dictionary, bless). And it is a little odd that Morgan used “taxis” twice, so perhaps he was a fan of taxis?

As is so often the case with ciphers, there appear to be some typos. So my best guesses would be that in the intended version of the plaintext:

  • “squal” should have been “squat”
  • “fubsy” should have been “fussy”
  • “bdunt” should have been “blunt”
  • “potto” should have been “lotto” (there’s also “bingo” in the first line)
  • “rebec” should have been “xebec” (again)

But… might it be that these are all deliberate, and that there’s in fact a second message hidden in the mistakes?

For my part, I don’t honestly think there is: but I can’t rule out the possibility that Morgan was more cunning than anyone suspected. So it remains a cipher (semi-)mystery.

“So, how can I help you today,” smiled Dr Wayfit breezily but briefly, “Mr., uh, Smedley?”

“I’ve been struggling in lockdown”, the man replied, looking evasively through the third floor window of the medical centre. “My mental health is suffering. I’m feeling very anxious about… the vaccines. You know.”

“For something that does so much good, there are far too many conflicting messages out there”, the doctor said. “Do you… ” – she paused, looking him squarely in the eyes – “…rely on social media for information?”

“Oh no”, the man said, his face suddenly brightening, “I get my information direct. From the source.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “You mean, from epidemiologists?”

“No!” Smedley laughed raucously, his head tipping backwards. “From the Voynich Manuscript. Everything about the coronavirus is in there, everything. Look at this.” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from an inside pocket and held it up for the doctor to see. “f69v. Proof. 100%. You can’t deny it. Even back in the 15th century, they knew. They Knew!

Dr Wayfit shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it’s actually a well-known fact that Wilfrid Voynich hoaxed the manuscript himself. You don’t have to look far to find well-illustrated websites arguing this point in a highly persuasive way.”

Shocked, Smedley leapt backwards towards the door, his picture of f69v clutched to his face in horror. “But… that makes no sense at all? What kind of crazy drugs are you self-administering?”

“No, it’s all just common sense”, she cooed reassuringly. “Take your f69v, for example – it’s nothing more complex than a series of brightly-coloured pipes arranged around a starfish, the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams.”

“Really? Is there even one medieval diagram remotely like it?”

She rolled her eyes extravagantly. “To be precise, it’s the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams could have been, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it that way. And so what Wilfrid Voynich was hoaxing was how any one of those million medieval diagrams could have looked, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it as a set of brightly-coloured pipes around a starfish.”

“An eight-armed starfish?”

“It’s a work of imagination, obviously.”

“But… it’s so obviously coronavirus”, Smedley spluttered, now purple in the face. “And even though I’ll happily admit that my conclusion can be difficult for some to accept, your explanation is ten times crazier. Maybe even a hundred times.”

“Look, there’s really no reason for you to feel so upset by the Voynich Manuscript. You’ve been in ‘qokdown’ for far too long, and we in VAnon are desperately keen for people to understand that…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“So, Dr Wayfit”, the police detective asked, looking at the body crumpled on the pavement far below the medical centre’s smashed window, the picture of f69v grasped firmly in the dead man’s hands, “you must admit this is a bit of a strange tableau, right?”

“Not really”, she replied, her eyes darting around distractedly. “The moment poor Mr Smedley told me that he thought the Voynich Manuscript had meaningful content, I knew instantly he was quite deranged. Honestly, he was a clear danger to himself, and I don’t think there’s anything I could have done to prevent this awful tragedy.”

The logic is ineluctably Vulcan: unsolved historical ciphers are cool… novelists like to lard their books with cool stuff… ergo here’s yet another cipher mystery novel to review.

The book’s author, Jess Lourey, is a Sociology/English professor: and if I told you that she also lectures in creative writing, you may have a good idea of where this is going.

Firstly, the bad stuff: anyone who doesn’t like the sound of reading all-italics flashback chapters telling how the two main young women protagonists shared ice cream and cookies and tried different hair styles when they were growing up together probably isn’t going to be able to last to the end of the book. I certainly had to grit my teeth fairly hard to get through some of these. These bits were more chick than lit, let’s say.

Also, anyone who finds it difficult to buy in to novels where the main characters are stalked across the country by spectacularly sadistic and implausible assassins (say, like The Da Vinci Code) may find their copy of the book involuntarily sailing across the room at some point (personally, I found page 79 quite challenging in this respect).

The good news is that Lourey has done a fair bit of cipher mystery lurking and looking, and presents the Beale Ciphers reasonably accurately (I doubt I’d be spoiling anyone’s read if I said that various of the protagonists make their way to a well-known vault in Virginia).

Overall, though, the plot plays out like an all-female National Treasure remake, complete with national monuments, suitably appropriated historical figures, and more hidden compartments than you can shake Nic Cage’s torso at (there’s even Alcatraz in there for Cage completists). Though rather than Science vs Religion or Black vs White or Blue vs Red or even Humans vs Insects (Philip K. Dick short story reference), Lourey pitches Evil Rich Men vs Idealistic Poor Women as her two Conspiratorial axes. Which is nice.

Cryptologically, Salem’s Cipher itself (one of the protagonists is called Salem) appears at the start, where Salem figures out a way of using Charles Babbage’s work to power quantum cryptology. But this promptly disappears, making it not so much a Chekhovian gun as a Checkhovian RPG. But perhaps it will reappear in Book 3. (Book 2 is set in Europe, but hopefully will manage not to reprise Garfield 2.)

Is Salem’s Cipher worth reading? To me, it feels like a slightly awkward cross-over, a chick lit feminists-save-the-world spin on the clunky mainstream crumb-trail cipher mystery Americana chase thriller genre: and if that description doesn’t put you off, you should probably get yourself a copy ASAP. 🙂

“Jack and the Cursed Manuscript” – Part One

1. MEDIEVAL HOVEL

(THOUGH AS THE LIGHTS COME UP, IT INCREASINGLY RESEMBLES A MODERN-DAY CRACK DEN)

JACK’S MUM: Woe is me! I’m a poor old peasant woman ‘oo ‘as frittered a giant’s castle full o’ gold on online casinos an’ Class A drugs.

JACK [aside to the audience]: You’d have thought it might have lasted longer than a week.

JACK’S MUM: Tell me, my darlin’ Jack, does we ‘ave anyfink in the world left ter sell?

JACK: Only the cow you won in a virtual meat raffle, the one you called “Meteor”.

METEOR: Moo.

JACK’S MUM [aside to the audience]: Face it, you can’t get Meteor than a cow. [badum-tshhh]

JACK: I’ll take her to market, I’m bound to see some more magic beans there. I’m on a lucky streak, got the Midas touch, I have.

JACK’S MUM [aside to the audience]: Don’t ‘e take after me? Ooh, I couldn’t be prouder!

2. TOWN SQUARE

TOWN CRYER: Young fellow!

JACK: Errrm… [looks around] do you mean me?

TOWN CRYER: The very same! The young man unwillingly taking his cow to market, just like Rick Astley and his sheep.

JACK: Rick Astley?

TOWN CRYER: It’s how he got rich, you know. “Never gonna give ewe up, never gonna let ewe down”.

METEOR: Moo.

TOWN CRYER: Exactly. And not at all like that idiot lad Jack who swapped his cow for magic beans and killed the giant.

JACK: Errrm… “idiot lad”?

TOWN CRYER: Even as we speak, insurance company agents are combing the land to track him down and bring him to justice.

JACK [backing away]: I’d… best be going, I think.

3. MEDIEVAL MARKET

JACK APPROACHES A BOOKSELLER WITH A MOUSTACHE AND TWINKLING EYES.

JACK: Excuse me, sir, but have you seen a curious traveller? He was right here last week, selling m-m-m-mysterious beans. Definitely not magic ones, anyway.

WILFRID: He’s been and gone. [badum-tshhh]

JACK: Oh no! So what priceless MacGuffin will I exchange our possessions for this week?

WILFRID: I have just the thing for you. [He brandishes the Voynich Manuscript] Behold – the world’s most unreadable manuscript! And it even has a blank price tag!

JACK: That’s my kind of price tag.

WILFRID: …because you’re insanely rich?

JACK: No, because I’m innumerate.

WILFRID: Errrm… so how much do you actually have to spend?

JACK: Basically, this cow.

METEOR: Moo.

WILFRID: Well… this manuscript’s proper price should be ten cows, but I’d accept one cow now with another nine in the future if you become unexpectedly filthy rich.

JACK: No, no, I had that last week: a guy selling magic geese here also wanted a down payment.

WILFRID [rolls eyes]: OK, just one cow for the manuscript, then.

JACK: A pleasure to do business with you, Mister. [Takes book and hands him cow’s lead]

WILFRID [aside to audience]: Why should I care? Now I’ve seen one, I can hoax as many as I like. Ethel will be delighted!

4. BACK AT THE HOVEL

JACK: I’m back, mum!

JACK’S MUM: So what did you get for dear old Meteor, then? More magic beans?

JACK: No, something much better. I give you – The World’s Most Unreadable Manuscript! [He triumphantly holds the book aloft]

JACK’S MUM: Errrm… [awkward pause] more unreadable than Article 57? And every footballer’s memoirs ever written?

JACK: At least 10% more unreadable than those, yes.

JACK’S MUM: So… what’s it about?

JACK [rolls eyes, passes the book to his mother]: It’s not about anything, it’s unreadable. Even the pictures aren’t about anything, they’re unreadable too.

JACK’S MUM: Well, that is a novelty. [Puts on airs and graces voice] One shall have to run one’s new acquisition past one’s dear friends next door.

JACK [encourages audience to join in]: Oh, No We Won’t!

JACK’S MUM: Oh, Yes, We Will. Dame Trot and Prince Salerno know all about ‘erbal medicine. They’re bound to be able to broaden your young scope.

JACK [muttering under his breath]: So I’ve heard, so I’ve heard.

JACK’S MUM: Come, young Jack. Take one’s arm as one perambulates to one’s neighbour’s esteemed location.

JACK: Whatevs, Mama. [shakes head silently]

5. AT DAME TROT’S CAMP MANSION

DAME TROT [opening the door]: How fantabulosa, it’s my bona omi young Jack! And his shyckled palone Margaret. [calls upstairs] Princey, off the khazi, visitors at front of ‘ouse.

JACK’S MUM: So delayted to see, you, may dear Dame Trot.

JACK: But… she’s a man?

DAME TROT: I’ll have none of that lingua in my flowery, young omi. Again in Polari, please.

JACK: But… Palone Trot is an omi?

DAME TROT [aside to the audience]: I don’t think the poor chicken knows he’s in a panto! [To Jack, somewhat condescendingly] Oh, it’s an old tradition in these parts.

JACK: But… your riah isn’t zhooshed like a palone, and you haven’t even got fake willets. What kind of a panto Dame are you?

DAME TROT [aghast]: Why, according to Charles Singer’s (1928) “From Magic to Science”, Dame Trot was a made-up female practitioner based on an entirely male medical tradition.

JACK: So you’re a Dame only in name?

DAME TROT: Precisely. You can’t just camp up your crypto to get onto Cipher Mysteries, these days you have to play by the ‘istorical rule book.

PRINCE SALERNO [emerging from inside the house]: Bona journo, everyone. What brings you here this bona morning?

JACK’S MUM: One has a mysterious book to show you both. [She extracts the Voynich Manuscript from her capacious handbag]

PRINCE SALERNO [visibly shocked and appalled]: Kiss my quongs and slap my town-hall drape, it is The Cursed Book that she has!

DAME TROT: What, Katie Price’s fifth autobiography?

PRINCE SALERNO: Nay, nay, 10% worse still – it is the book that has no beginning and no end.

DAME TROT: That still sounds like “Love, Lipstick and Lies”

PRINCE SALERNO: Jest not!

DAME TROT: I jest did.

PRINCE SALERNO: Margaret and Jack, to free yourself from this terrible curse, you must now climb Mount Doom and hurl the book deep into the biggest Crack you can find.

JACK’S MUM: Oh. Is there not time for a cup of Earl Grey before one goes?

PRINCE SALERNO [glowers even more powerfully]: No. When destiny raises its head, you must grasp it firmly with both hands.

DAME TROT: Definitely both hands.

PRINCE SALERNO: Go now, and remember the ancient wisdom of the Masons – the bigger the Crack, the better the builder. Fare thee well!

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

What journalists the world over love to do is to bring two vaguely related things together to review or discuss, as if by doing so they identify an incipient trend or fashion. Once pointed out, of course, this trick reeks of self-indulgent modern tossery: but in the scientific interest of exploring different ways of writing about unsolved historical ciphers, I thought it might at least be a little interesting to try on this dropped shoe, to see for myself whether it’s fur or glass.

So here goes.

Jess Feldman’s “Call It a Premonition”

Jess Feldman’s slim book of poetry “Call It a Premonition” eerily subtitles itself “Translations from the Voynich Manuscript”.

When I tweeted Jess to ask how her set of poems related to the Voynich Manuscript, she replied:

I didn’t base the poems on any specific pages. Just created the poems by looking at the manuscript holistically and imagining it as the diary of a 13 year old girl. Even though it’s a different time period, I was influenced by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Is it any good? Well, if you want you can read the 18-page PDF here and decide for yourself (and let’s face it, it’s not going to take long). For me, though, there are some obvious highlights: and with my unsolved historical cipher hat on, I certainly couldn’t read the line in “Another Dead Fellow”…

Look:
I’ve a shiny new hairpiece. See, cuz: a mermaid

…without thinking of the curious fish/mermaid hybrid that appears on f79v in Quire 13:

Similarly, the line in “I Dreamed Of”…

a leashed hart young doe collared in soft pink bouclé
the king’s own grazing animals

…brought to my mind the strangely red-painted animal on the same page (note where the heavy painter has smooshed green paint all over the lines, so that we can’t easily discern the outlines that were originally drawn here):

Finally, “The Summer of 1438” will surely ring true for some long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers:

I’m learning
Sometimes
Unsolved mysteries
It’s better not to ask

My favourite single poem from the set, however, is her eponymous “Call It a Premonition”, which is last but certainly not least:

In a distant future
I look like a boy only
still a girl but in slacks okay
I am moving my lacquered
fingers so text materializes
across a framed fluid tapestry
without seams Without origin
unmarried far from dead
childless and leather-booted
I say words like Co-workers,
I hate this fucking job and
I mean it but I am happy
enough I think
comparatively speaking
nonetheless

To me, this kicks an angry skateboard shoe at our foolish modernity’s ankle in a way that stings both kicker and kickee. I enjoyed it, and hope for more good Feldmany stuff in the future, slacks or otherwise. 😉

The poetry of “Supercomputer CARMEL”

In many ways, all that ackshwall poetterie couldn’t really sit further from our second contender in the ring tonight. Championed by CompSci historical cipher buff Professor Kevin Knight, CARMEL is a supercomputer running AI pattern-recognition software (according to, wait, the History Channel press release is round here somewhere) that he filled with all manner of documents and items to do with the Zodiac Killer Cipher, as part of the Hunt For The Zodiac TV documentary series that started a few days ago.

Well… that’s basically what the History Channel (and the programme makers at Karga Seven) would like us to think. However, despite all the nicely-lit close-ups of charcoal grey racks studded with the obligatory array of blinking LEDs, CARMEL isn’t a “supercomputer” at all, it’s a laboratory teaching support code toolkit developed (in C++ with a bit of Boost) and extensively tweaked over the last twenty years at the Information Sciences Institute at USC where Knight is a professor. Strictly speaking, it’s a “finite-state transducer package written by Jonathan Graehl”, that basically lets you set up a whole load of linked and/or nested finite state machines and then do all manner of clever things with them, such as train them (i.e. condition the transition weights) just by passing data into them, via either “EM (expectation-maximization) training” or “Bayesian Chinese Restaurant Process training”.

In fact, ISI students (and doubtless many others) have wheeled out the CARMEL toolkit over that period to write all manner of experimental NLP (natural language processing) software, from cipher solvers – though if you have to repeat anything “trillions of times” to get a result, something’s probably going horribly wrong with your choice of algorithm – to accelerated knowledge acquisition to (yes, you guessed it) synthetic poetry generation.

The wonderfully creepy thing is that by seeding the (CARMEL toolkit assisted) poetry generator specifically with the corpus of letters written by the Zodiac Killer, you can – with a smidgeon of justification – say that you’re generating Zodiac Killer (-seeded) poetry. It’s by no means a simulated look into his head, sure, but rather a rhyming sampling plucked from the linguistic soup apparently (on the evidence of the contents of his letters, anyway) swilling around there. Sort of.

But is this artificial poetry any good? Well, (with the caveat that I don’t know the settings or the precise keywords used to seed the particular runs) I can do no better than quote some examples given on the web and let you decide for yourself.

Existence enters your entire nation.
A twisted mind reveals becoming manic,
An endless modern ending medication,
Another rotten soul becomes dynamic.

Or under pressure on genetic tests.
Surrounded by controlling my depression,
And only human torture never rests,
Or maybe you expect an easy lesson…

Handily, you can also generate your own here. I tried out a few for myself (the title of each is the keyword I chose), each took no more than a couple of seconds to pop up:

BRUTAL

Another day without a life abused.
Confused or blinded by the nitty gritty,
Afraid of being openly accused,
You and me against the world severely.

Or this:

PARADISE

Something like an angel on the vine!
An endless dream about eternal youth,
A power full of blood and sugar pine,
A sigh of love and see the naked truth.

OK, it’s not hard to see that these are simply terrible poems, mashing up pukable birthday card rhymes with a madman’s self-loathing and anger. But perhaps some entrepreneur will now use this to corner the market in psychopathic greetings cards (though perhaps even modern society has a little way further to descend before that really hits the zeitgeisty spot).

Hegelian synthesis?

This is of course the point where journalists, happy to have simulated catching a trend (or created a simulacrum of catching a trend, depending on how picky you are), press [Send], kick off their loafers, and inject some ridiculous Class A drug (or whatever journos prefer these days). “It’s a wrap!” as I once shouted angrily (having actually ordered a sandwich).

But having thought about it for a few days, I think that a common thread subtly links the two sets of poetry. In the case of Jess Feldman, she imagined herself into the inner mental world of “a 13 year old girl” living in a brutal historical period: while the Zodiac Killer text corpus also transports us (via the CompSci magic of trained finite-state transducers) into the stage of his broken psychodrama. Yet for me, the challenging link between the two is not the brutality of the two worlds (by which I mean the girl’s outer world and the Zodiac’s inner world) but the two sets’ shared performative aspect.

Why? Well: in my opinion, Jess Feldman’s poetry is – I think, but feel free to have your own opinion – written as performance pieces: the poems are not hurty / shouty / broken / combat wordplay, but stuff that could comfortably be performed: their language is consistently wry and agile, half-spoken thoughts in the grey area between what we say and what we think.

Similarly, even though the Zodiac Killer synthetic poetry is essentially an experimental linguistic simulation, it is necessarily anchored within the inherently narcissistic and manipulative language he employed for effect in his letters: and whether you like it or not, I think it is the raw language that constrains the computer’s output far more than the rhyme scheme.

Without any real doubt, the Zodiac Killer’s letters (and indeed his ciphertexts) were constructed solely for the practical needs of his hateful theatre and his need to control by terror, not for communication. The notion that we might ever actually learn something so banal as his name from any of his ciphertexts (even the Z13) seems to me ridiculous and pathetically needy: what he wrote was never a diary, but a performance that’s both as fake as Reality TV and as psychotic as Charles Manson.

My left arm, disembodied, slowly rejoins the mothership
Searching for adverbs, unsuccessful as ever
Distant aches filed for future reference
Blur, wash, smudged light chinks overpainting
Eyes that shouldn’t be open quickly close
And re-enter that censored dream again, the one with the
And the
And the two naked women standing oddly, reading telegrams
“ABACTOR ABLATIVE” says one. The other:

The room fills with water and light and shouts from the trapped
I look down at my ticket: Third Class, yet again.

And I realise that I am awake.

The notion that Jorge Luis Borges’ “Labyrinths” – a collection of idiosyncratic short stories, essays, and even parables by the much-acclaimed Argentinian writer, wrangled into English with no little hair-pulling – somehow parallels Voynich research is one that has been floated and repeated for decades.

But is it true now, here in the Fake News world of 2017? Is Borges a harbinger of what we see, or are we all post-Borges?

Describing The Indescribable

What Borges does in his short stories is to gleefully plunder history, not for mere colour (as so many writers now do) but to subvert it and channel it into a secret paradoxical alt.history, which typically forms the conceptual spine of each story’s skeleton.

The twisted steps backwards he takes to go forward again are equal parts erudite and imaginary. These all lead to a creative pyre whose flames are fed by philosophy, religion, esotericism, literature, self-referentiality, dreams, chess, labyrinths, and the numberless ways to cheat (or at least sidestep) the infinities of time, space, and mathematics.

Yet despite the range of references, the setting is predominantly a high-register, sexless, atheistic domain, ruled by stern, darkly logical planets. As a reader, you often feel as though the author is trying to conjure up a paradoxical exit visa from one dark oppressive reality into another.

Borges’ Three Tells

It’s not hard to tell his writing apart from just about anybody else’s.

His first writing trademark is embellished and over-decorated footnotes and references to books and articles which may or may not exist, embedding (if not actually entangling) his narratives in an imaginary textual web. This corresponds to the “falsifying and magnifying” tendency he derides himself (at a remove) for.

His second trademark is inserting himself into his stories, often as an unreliable narrator (not such a modern conceit as some may think).

His third trademark is that his stories almost always reveal themselves to be less than the sum of their parts – the denouement is often little more than a peek behind Oz’s curtain, collapsing the conceit preceding it.

Is Borges Worth Reading?

This is a tough question. Many of the things that are good about his writing would also likely make him completely unreadable to many modern readers. If you are impatient and/or prefer things to be grounded in the concrete, Borges’ concept-heavy counter-factuals are almost certainly not for you.

Yet the bigger problem, I think, is one of style, because Borges writes with a kind of refined, over-polished lightness that somehow never quite becomes levity. I don’t believe that the reading difficulties are translation artefacts: they’d be just as difficult in Hawaiian or Esperanto.

Is Borges a fellow-traveller to Voynich researchers? He certainly sets his readers cerebral challenges, ones which wear cloaks of obscurity, esotericism, and a tight knowingness, yet which he then reveals to be simpler than they at first seemed: and in some ways this is the (idealized) research trajectory.

But in the end, I think the answer is no: his mystification and erudition aren’t his means to knowledge, they are merely the scaffolding he uses to support the canvas behind his all-too-briefly-erected stages. Borges offers only an anagram of research, not research itself: the teasing paranoia of conspiracy, rather than causality.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Borges: but, like fried grasshoppers dipped in Marmite, I can quite see he’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes. :-/

A few years back, Bill Walsh sent me a (fairly early, as I recall) draft of his vaguely-Voynich-Manuscript-themed novel to have a look at. And now that a proper copy has finally landed on my doorstep, all finished and shiny, the inevitable question arises…

Is it any good?

Tales From The Black Chamber: A Supernatural Thriller

First things first: anyone who fills their bookshelves solely with High Literature can look away now. “Tales From The Black Chamber” was written more as an amuse-bouche, to the point that many of the book’s protagonists were simply light-hearted pastiches of Bill’s friends at the time. He even mentions me (p.110) as an interesting Voynich theorist (but don’t hold that against him, it’s mercifully brief).

His story races past all manner of things cryptographic and demonological, with a sassy female bibliophile main character who gets swept up (mostly unwillingly) in a world-spanning story that’s far more fin du monde than fan-fic. Even though knowing a bit about Richard Kieckhefer and the history of magic circles beforehand might help the reader a little, such research fare is certainly far from essential here. Oddly enough, I didn’t remember the story’s ending at all from when I read it the first time round (perhaps it changed along the way?), but it did wrap everything up quite satisfyingly.

So… what are the scores, George Dawes? Well, my arithmetic goes like this: Tales From The Black Chamber gets four stars, basically for being pacy, genuinely readable, not outstaying its welcome, and having characters you don’t actually want to punch after half a page. The extra half a star I’d really like to give it for The Best Gratuitous Inclusion Of A Mongolian Shaman gets cancelled out by The Worst Job Offer (And Least Plausible Job Acceptance) In History Ever Ever (Ever), along with the main characters’ hyperactive overuse of weaponry (despite the fact that this has become completely par for the course in a primarily American genre, arguably).

Even though Bill seems never to have expected it to turn out so well, I think he’s ended up doing a damn fine job: and anyone who secretly enjoys the warm buzz of reading about necromancy and the supernatural that always seems to be a mere half-step away from the Voynichian research mainstream will probably enjoy his book. Good luck, Bill, I hope it does well! 🙂

PS: doubtless some people (OK, mainly Americans) will actually rather enjoy all that gun fetishry, but it’s a big Internet out there, with plenty of space to write your own reviews if such a thing wouldst pleaseth thee greatly. If so, then go ahead, knocketh thyself out. 🙂

Too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel, some might say that The Voynich Affair by Linnet Moss suffers from both problematic elongation and improper positioning.

But given that Google (until today) yielded precisely zero hits for the phrase “Voynich erotica”, Moss is clearly reaming out a niche untouched by few (if any) previous hands.

Voynich Erotica

But has she hit the spot?

I must confess that I found reading “The Voynich Affair” on a Kindle on the bus towards Staines in the morning rush hour more than a bit unsettling. Coming to the genre for the first time (so to speak), what I found oddest was that it seems to be written by people scared to death of physical intimacy, and aimed at readers who are also scared to death of physical intimacy. No, really.

I don’t know, it’s like it was typed by someone wearing gloves: chic, distantly-perfumed Italian leather gloves, sure, but gloves nonetheless. And for all the shudderingly implausible physical encounters described in the text, the whole endeavour came across as being locked within a resolutely lonely world, sans any flicker of Sartrean authenticity.

As a result, I can’t claim to have liked (or even mildly empathised with) any of the protagonists: but given that there are plenty of Internationally Acclaimed Bestsellers which failed that same test even more dramatically (Digital Fortress, anyone? *sigh*), that hardly amounts to a serious criticism. And anyway, that’s probably not the point of erotica, right?

At this point, a traditional review would tell you about how the story is based around extra missing pages of the manuscript in a French chateau, and involves various broodingly mysterious (and sociopathic) Voynich researchers: but frankly that’s a bit pointless. By now, you’ve almost certainly decided whether or not you’re interested, so all I can usefully add is that all fifteen chapters are freely available online, starting here.

The Selfish Reason

At this point, I have to ‘fess up to the real reason I bought a copy of The Voynich Affair (which Linnet Moss published as part of “The Mind-Body Problem: Stories of Desire and Love in Academe” (2012), complete with Voynich page on the (virtual) front cover)…

mind-body-problem

…which is that I wanted to see if the various Voynich researchers in the story were loosely based on any real-world Voynich researchers.

OK, OK: I wanted to see if I had been parodied. Not that I can’t take a joke, it’s just that I’d rather know about the joke than find out about it a decade later. 🙂

Happily, though, I can exclusively reveal that no Voynich researcher seems to have been openly parodied (no Randy Zenbergen, no Donna Via-Odeon, and no sign of the infamous Len Pickling), nor were any Voynichians’ sexual proclivities (errrm, to the best of my knowledge) turned into sort-of-page-turning Voynich-themed erotic encounters.

Unless you know better, that is? 😉

But… Who Would Write Such A Thing?

Author Linnet Moss claims to be:

“a college professor who writes fiction in her spare time. She adores old books, new books, cats, frogs, miniature books, wine, Trappist ales, tea from Ceylon, vegetarian gourmet food, London, Rome, Art Deco skyscrapers, and beautiful men.”

Of course, while some (or indeed all) of this may be true, it remains just as possible that Moss is a short balding non-professor bloke from Deptford with OCD, conceptually not too far removed from “paradee man woman” Wor Cheryl, pet.

As a result, I can (just about) see how some readers might possibly see decrypting the author’s identity, age, and/or indeed gender from the text as a worthwhile challenge.

For me, though, I’m sticking with the Voynich Manuscript: that has more than enough strangely inscrutable nymphs to worry about for one lifetime. 😉

A nice set of past Voynich limericks are elsewhere on Cipher Mysteries, but I thought (six years on) I’d write a couple of new ones for you:

Might Voynichese be Nahuatl?
Or incomprehensible prattle?
We might never find
How this thing was designed
Without patronage from Seattle.

The Voynich Manuscript’s a conundrum
One that draws us away from the humdrum
It defies those who attack it
But have faith – you’ll soon crack it
Illegitimi non carborundum! 🙂