Review of “People of the Book”…

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Geraldine Brooks’ novel “The People of the Book” (2008) tells the story of a (fictional) Australian book conservator called Hanna Heath, and her encounters with a (real) codex called the Sarajevo Haggadah. In this sense, it is very much akin to the Voynich Manuscript novels I review here, which typically use the mystery of the VMs as a projective backdrop for their quasi-historical stories of life, death, passion and (occasionally) beauty, plucking the occasional codicological thread from our collective skein of Voynichological ignorance to frouf up into a faux Restoration wig.

One page in particular is returned to again and again: I wished this had been on the book cover so that I could see for myself what the fuss was about. Well, here it is, book fans (and there are plenty more on this Talmud site, and on this facsimile publishing site here):-

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Sarajevo Haggadah – family seder illustration

Brooks has given her book a formal, almost musical structure: chapters set in Hanna’s present day ping-pong with chapters recounting enjoyable storylets of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s (imagined) past, each evoked by a single codicological detail – an insect’s wing (Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana, just so you know), a missing clasp, wine stains, saltwater, a single white hair. In each case, the life and atmosphere of a particular historical Jewish community is nicely evoked: and there are plenty of little structural surprises scattered throughout to keep a sense of movement in the narrative.

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Sarajevo Haggadah marginalia from Venice, 1609

In one important sense, the point of the novel is that it tries to draw a parallel between (a) the process of trying to get to know the past of an object, and (b) the process of trying to get to know oneself: this is, after all, what history (as a tool) is for. Yet despite aiming her bow in such a noble direction, Brooks doesn’t quite hit the bullseye: though her protagonist finally uncovers the secret lives both of the haggadah (just as I’ve said with the VMs, incandescent lighting rocks) and of her family, she remains fundamentally the same shallow, dissatisfied shagette we met in the first chapter.

Yet in other ways, the real meat of the novel is in Brooks’ account of the codicology, based in part on observing real-life Austrian book restorer Andrea Pataki working with the actual Sarajevo Haggadah in December 2001. Brooks’ description of the texture and sheer tactility of an up-close (but slow-motion) encounter with a ancient manuscript is both detailed and (in my experience, at least) highly evocative of how this kind of thing actually does play out in reality. If you won’t ever get to touch a real-life manuscript yourself, maybe reading “The People of the Book” isn’t such a bad alternative. 🙂

Look, I enjoyed it and I hope it does well for Brooks: with “The Reader” doing so well at the cinema, I can quite imagine this being picked up  (doubtless Kate Winslet could do a bonza Ozzie accent). Yet whereas The Reader was about hiding illiteracy, Brooks’ book is more about uncovering literacy, using codicology to imaginatively reconstruct the lives of the people behind this amazing book. As such, I can only applaud.

Review of “The Voynich Enslavement”…

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This is a weird one: The Voynich Enslavement by Hank Snow is a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-themed experimental novel, in an alternative society built around whipping, slaves, S&M and all that jazz. I’m hardly giving away my personal orientation to say that, ummm, this isn’t really my bag: but there you go, it is what it is.

The story stops after seven chapters (which was when Hank Snow died), though most readers will likely give up after a page or two: despite the full-on mix of bravado, bravura and braggadoccio, the majority of the pleasure was probably more for the writer than for the reader.

So far, so nothing: but what struck me is how this casts a raking light across the age-old advice to “write about what you know”. Given that hardly anybody in the big scheme of things actually knows anything about the VMs, under what circumstances could an author ever sensibly weave the VMs into their novel? “Write about what you don’t know” doesn’t seem so much postmodern as deliberately obtuse, if not actually foolish. As I have said many times, trawling through the sustained paralysis of the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page yields nothing of great substance: yet this is surely what most novelists seem to rely on when constructing their great works.

My own advice to the legion (well, certainly cohorts) of would-be Voynich novelists is that, whatever your postmodern / ironic / amused take on this  “unreadable book”, the VMs is actually a very poor hook to hang a fine coat upon, let alone to catch a fine fish with. Find yourself a big theme (or two) for the actual story, and work hard to keep a very light touch on both the history and the mystery – the point at which these stop being secondary to the plot is the point at which you will lose your readers.

Review of “The Voynich Enigma”…

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Back in January, I predicted that 2008 would be “the year of the Voynich” – not that it would get solved (don’t be so ridiculous, tcha!), but rather that we would be engulfed in a semi-tsunami of Voynich-related fiction, a novelistic response to the VMs meme as it seeps into mainstream culture. And this wave has indeed hit the shore: my big fat list of Voynich novels lists five new titles for the year (plus a couple of others held over until 2009) as well as a rerelease of Max MacCoy’s 1994 Indiana Jones / Voynich book.

And so to the latest one, William “Baz” Cunningham’s just-released third novel “The Voynich Enigma“. For connoisseurs of the genre, this runs on eerily familiar rails: the hero stumbles across a key to the Voynich Manuscript, eventually discovers that it encodes some kind of treasure map (in this case, to the much-speculated-upon Templar hoard), battles against someone else racing for the same treasure (in this case, an evil Mamluk), and so forth. I’m sure You Get The General Idea.

I also have to flag straight off that this is self-publishing at its most “self-“: the author inserts into his narrative a thinly fictionalized version of, errrm, himself (though changing his nickname from “Baz” to “Bones” ), his cousin, his wife, his dog, etc. Perhaps some passing Eng. Lit. grad student will let us know the correct academic name for such faux-autobiographical works (might it be “biographique”?): certainly, it takes the phrase “identifying with the hero” onto a whole new level.

Cunningham’s writing is a bit “Tom Sawyer, Detective” meets Simon Singh, a little bit like hominy grits festooned with lumps of historical meat. But for all the homespun backyardiness, it does have an undeniable charm that makes the 300+ pages an easy read. Mercifully, it is free of overblown Hollywoodesque fights and bad sex scenes, even if prizes are at stake nowadays (one gets the feeling Mrs Cunningham would not have been impressed).

It’s true that the book’s only joke – that, yes, college-educated Americans can actually be smart sometimes – does wear a tad thin by the end. And that its history research does often tend to the superficial. And that the historical dialogue is occasionally too modern-sounding for purists. And that Roger Bacon really, truly didn’t create the VMs (Cunningham relied mainly on Levitov’s book). But for all that, it’s perfectly OK.

Even classifying it as a “novel” rather misses the point: it is closer to some kind of Cunningham family pipedream, thin tendrils of historical smoke above a West Virginia farmhouse coiling together to form a novel-like shape in the still air: it’s a hopeful fantasy, blending past, present, and future into a home-cooked dish du jour.

Oddly, “The Voynich Enigma” most reminds me of Filarete’s libro architettonico. Back in 1465, the Italian architect Filarete concocted a strange ad hoc mélange of autobiography, architecture, fiction, and fantasy to try to promote himself to powerful patrons: without book distributors looking to its back cover for a helpful shelving genre to slot his book into, he was free to say just what he wanted, and in whatever way he wanted. To me, what links Filarete and Cunningham across the five centuries is simply an idiosyncratic self-publishing idealism, that really isn’t about the launch party, the PR, the film options, the points above the line, the Frankfurt & London circus, or even the making money.

Perhaps, ultimately, the Voynich Manuscript itself will turn out to be just as idealistic, a document whose hidden treasure will simply be what it says about its author – the ultimate piece of self-publishing, with a print-run of one. 🙂

Review of “Codex”…

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I’ve mentioned Lev Grossman a few times on this blog (most notably here and here): so when I recently stumbled across a copy of his novel “Codex” (2004), I jumped at the opportunity to read it. (Thank you the charity shop by Virginia Water station).

Though (strictly speaking) Codex isn’t a cipher novel per se, its protagonists stumble uncertainly through a historical / codicological fug that should be strikingly familiar to anybody with an interest in the Voynich Manuscript. Yet at the same time, Grossman counterpoints that whole manuscript-detective strand with a completely parallel narrative that is set inside a vividly virtual multiplayer online game: and it shouldn’t spoil anything much if I note that he has deft enough plot construction technique to bring the two worlds together at the end of his book in a reasonably satisfying way.

For me, the biggest disappointment was the main character Edward Wozny, who – for all the action and potty plotty twists – remains a bit of a cipher, a blank canvas. He comes across as tweedy (if not actually just plain dull), so it’s hard to see what all the achingly-bright young things who sashay in and out of his orbit really see in him.

Where “Codex”‘s central plot conceit most sharply departs from the real world is (for me) the notion that Certain Powerful People would have some kind of interest in controlling whether or not a lost ancient manuscript’s secret story is revealed – and (according to this kind of worldview) where Power and Knowledge collide, you get Heresy. Yet (back in the real world) heresy, like wine, lasts only a few decades (however well you make it), and quickly yields to the arbitrary ravages of time: (capital-H) ‘History’ is just an apologist’s gloss placed on that prolonged turmoil, trying to salvage theories of continuity (lineage, cycles, revolutions, longue durée, etc) in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Heresy, basically, is pretty much as short-term as any politician’s promises. Having said that, there’s an entire modern novel-writing industry premised upon heresy’s being a long-term phenomenon, so what do I know?

As to the book in general, Grossman writes briskly yet engagingly: even his British characters have tolerably OK voices (which is quite a pleasant change). I enjoyed it, but at times (with my editorial hat on) the lack of internal dimension to the characters did make me wonder whether for Grossman it was an exercise more in novelized screenwriting than in fiction writing. Still, lots of book buyers continue to have an appetite for that kind of geometrical surface plottery, so who am I to judge?

A final thought for the day: could it be that modern novelists who aspire to mass market sales too often succumb to the notion of pre-writing the film-of-the-book, perhaps to try to spin money from selling the film option (even if nobody buys the novel itself)? The problem is that screenwriting (with a few honourable exceptions) is largely about the external logic of a story (its “event topology”, if you like),  while literature is mainly about the story’s internal logic (its “emotional dynamics”): trying to serve both masters simultaneously is a thing that few writers do really well. So: perhaps writers should collaborate more? Oh well…

Review of “The Voynich Project”…

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As a Brit, there’s a very particular class of American-made sequel that fills my film-watching soul with despair. On planes and slow Sundays, you’ve doubtless caught a few exemplars yourself: “Garfield 2”, “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London”, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” all spring readily to my mind, but these form but the tip of a particularly yellow-coloured iceberg.

The template is horrifically simple: having achieved moderate success with a first film by pandering to a peculiarly parochial home market, the US-based producers then look for somewhere vageuely ‘exotic’ (but still English-speaking) in which to set the follow-up. Almost inevitably, dear old Lahn-don Town gets the nod: and thus usually commences the exhausting directorial circus of finding American acting talent who can produce comedy UK regional accents as badly as American screenwriters can write them.

So far, so insular: but what gets my goat is not the fact that London has been chosen (actually, it’s a complex, interesting, intensely compromised place with a billion stories of its own), but rather that what gets realised in celluloid is a kind of bizarre fairytale version, complete with pea-souper fogs, whistling Cocker-ney cabbies (what, Polish and Cockney??), scheming upper-class twits (inevitably with huge estates in the country), and salt-of-the-earth plebs (without two brass farthings to rub together). Sorry to say it, guys, but these days London is actually more Dick Cheney than Dick Van Dyke.

All the same, I’d have to say that those much-maligned American film producers could just about pull off this whole stunt and, indeed, produce a masterpiece from this cloying amalgamation of unpromising clichés. But by this stage their budget has all-too-often already disappeared into the cavernous pockets of the oh-so-amusing comedy lead characters: and thus vanishes into painfully thin air any notion of hiring a writer of real genius, the kind you’d need to bring such a dead-before-it-was-ever-born project to life.

And so onto James K. Rollins’ new book “The Voynich Project” (2008).

Rollins builds his story around a polarity eerily familiar to Indiana Jones fans, teaming a lantern-jawed hero and a feisty female archaeologist against indestructible disfigured Nazis wielding futuristic weaponry. Into this (already somewhat eggy) mix he adds a group of Indigo children (each with their own superpower), just about every English-speaking secret military force in the world, ancient maps, Carl Jung’s Red Diary, and the Vatican, etc etc. Oh, and there’s an American Indian consciously modelled on Chewbacca. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare: but is it Dan Brown?

Look – I’m a sucker for the kind of pacy, evocative writing that you would need to turn such a morass of potboiler elements into a genuine piece of fun. However, from my own European point of view, that train never really arrives – instead, the book comes across as a stream of mystery-themed ideas machine-gunned in the reader’s direction, as if the countless holes in the story can be filled through a kind of macho puppydog exuberance. Sorry, JK: though notionally a “Euro-thriller”, its scope and writing are both just too narrowly American to win me over.

But there’s also the whole Voynich Manuscript side of the book.

Rollins has clearly taken the time to read up on the VMs and to engage with its strange pictures, for which I applaud him (I even get a brief mention in the notes at the end, which is nice, however unwarranted). Unfortunately, one thing manages to spoil the whole party.

Briefly, what happens is: hero goes to the British Museum/Library to meet man studying the alchemical side of the Voynich Manuscript; because the man has disappeared, the hero instead meets his sister (who also happens to work there); they go to a pub in the East End; hero learns about the woman’s mysterious Celtic tattoo on her back; Nazi thugs enter the pub; she produces a key from above the back door; they escape out to the rear into a messy gunfight… and when the woman is eventually captured by the Nazis, her tattoo turns out to contain an ancient map / key to the secrets hidden in the Voynich Manuscript.

The problem is that this central storyline exactly reprises probably the best-selling (and quite possibly the best-written) Voynich novel yet, Max McCoy’s (1995) “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” – you know, the one I recommend that all aspiring Voynich novelists should read first. If there had been just a handful of similarities, I could possibly have passed over them in silence – but this is all much too much for me to bear.

No reviewer ever wants to be in this position – but honestly, what else can I say?

Review of “The Shakespeare Secret”…

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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…

Review of “The Source”…

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The view you take of the Voynich Manuscript’s text inevitably affects the view you take of its drawings: though you could construct scenarios where (for example) someone sane did all the writing and someone mad added all the pictures, they really wouldn’t be very likely. And so there are actually only three broad classes of Voynich theory that have attracted attention over the years:-

  1. It’s written in an unknown / synthetic language –> the pictures are representational
  2. It’s written in cipher or private shorthand –> the pictures are obscured / encrypted
  3. It’s meaningless / hoaxed nonsense –> the pictures are meaningless / nonsensical

\In “The Source”, bestselling novelist Michael Cordy takes option 1 as his starting point, and weaves a pacy yarn around the amazing South American secrets hidden in the text by a Jesuit missionary / priest called “Father Orlando Falcon”, holding a bizarre redemptive power which the Vatican itself feels threatened by, yet which might be able to save the lives of the atheist geologist hero’s decipherer wife and their unborn child, yada yada yada. But enough of the PR-speak.

By all rights, I should hate this book: right from the start, it pits the Superior General of the Society of Jesus (basically the uber-Jesuit) and his homicidal killer half-brother against a rationalist oil scientist and a not-very-convincing linguistics student, in a kind of 1940s cartoon propaganda take on Religion vs Science. And as regular blog readers will know, my heart normally sinks a mile whenever evil Jesuits’ crooked noses and gaunt faces pop up in a novel (it was a cliche 350 years ago, and even Dan Brown was smart enough to try to reinvent it as Opus Dei). And here we also have an added Big Oil vs Gaia wrestling bout awkwardly threaded through the narrative.

You can doubtless see where this is going: even though Michael Cordy’s craft has improved dramatically since his 1997 debut novel “The Messiah Code” (which I reviewed here), his Big Themes construction and Top Trumps who-will-win-as-if-you-don’t-already-know characterization really don’t work for me. And yet “The Source” still manages to comprise, despite its superabundance of traditionalist book-for-the-beach tropes, as good an introduction to the mystery of the VMs as anything out there. (The only bit of wishful thinking is the “Voynich Week” mini-conference at the Beinecke – as if!)

And finally: I think there is a lesson in there for Voynich theorists, too: if you take an Option 1 approach and try to read the drawings in the balneological (‘water’) section too literally, the nymphs will tie you in knots.

Voynich-related novel reviews…

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In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into.

In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based Macguffin, a time capsule mechanically carrying [powerful / occult / heretical] ideas forward from the [insert bygone era name here] to satisfy the present-tense needs of the plot. Plenty of old-fashioned writers continue to hammer out such formulaic Victorian penny-dreadful tat even now: what kind of barrier could ever hold back such a tide?

Thankfully, contemporary writers have begun to engage with other ideas in the cloud of ideas surrounding the VMs. Though I personally don’t think it will turn out to be delusional nonsense, channelled writing, off-world DNA-creation technology, or even a deliberate hoax, I think these are interesting angles far more worthy of being explored in fiction.

With this in mind, here’s a list of the novel reviews on my site:-

(1) It’s brutally old-fashioned, but Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone [review] by Max McCoy presses all the right buttons. It knows it’s a piece of junk but simply doesn’t care: it’s having too much fun. Recommended!

(2) I had high hopes for “PopCo” [review] by Scarlett Thomas, but it just ended up like a creative writing collage. If you can cope with the crypto-geeky Gen-X No-Logo buzzwordiness of the whole concept, you’ll probably enjoy it: but for me it fails to work on most levels.

(3) Rather than engage with the VMs directly, “Vellum” [review] by Matt Rubinstein creates an Australian doppelganger of it, and has a lot of fun exploring a would-be decipherer’s descent into madness and/or confusion. Recommended!

(4) “Enoch’s Portal” [review] by A.W.Hill boils up a heady stew of alchemy, cultishness and quantum pretension, where Leo Levitov’s Cathar hypothesis about the Voynich Manuscript is merely one of many spices sloshed into the mixing bowl. No Michelin stars, sorry.

Review of "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone"…

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No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I’m talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film’s gigantic marketing spend?)

The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, actually the first page of Chapter 1): McCoy manages to present its history very lightly and not bog the reader down in too many details. But as the book is set in 1933, there wasn’t a whole UFO angle to cover (or other such modern confections). Instead, you get a little bit of Newbold, Bacon, alchemy, Major John M. Manly (!!!), John Dee, Kelley, the Shew Stone, and even a quick reference to Wilfrid Voynich in New York: basically, everything moves briskly along in the kind of proper screenplay-like way you’d hope from an Indy novel. Yes, there’s even the occasional snake (for readers playing Indy buzzword bingo, I guess).

I’ll admit it: I was charmed by the book. It’s small (293 pocket-size pages), no larger than you’d imagine a Japanese commuter squeezing into a pocket, and reads so quickly that at some points (most notably in the end sequence past the oasis) I deliberately closed my eyes to slow the pace down so that I could properly picture the scene in my mind.

Historically, the book has a deliciously light touch throughout, in particular when Indy and his companion are improbably rescued by an elderly French couple called Nicholas and Peronelle (p.200) – and if you can’t work out who they are by that stage in the story, you very possibly deserve to be shot.

I liked all the atlantici history and the Shelta Thari stuff (there’s a Wikipedia page too) woven in: but note that when McCoy writes “Nus a dhabjan dhuilsa“, he probably means “Nus a dhabjon dhuilsha” [‘The blessing of God on you’], though I’d prefer not to pick a fight with a tinker / tinsmith as to which one is correct. Incidentally, my guess is that McCoy picked up the reference to Thari from Roger Zelazny’s 10-book ‘Amber’ series.

Inevitably, there are some historical mistakes in the book (the VMs wasn’t in Yale in 1933, I’m pretty sure that the British Museum had a positive rotograph of at least some of the VMs in 1929, etc), but frankly I couldn’t care less. It’s a delightful, frothy, whip-cracking romp through alchemical history, that I think should be required reading for any modern Voynich novelist.

The Big Fat List (of Voynich novels)…

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I’ve been meaning to put this Big Fat List of English-language Voynich-related novels together for a while: I’ve appended links to the most significant review / blog mentions I’ve made about them. I’ll update this every once in a while, so please feel free to drop me a line if you have or know of a Voynich-themed book you think should be mentioned or reviewed.

English-language Voynich novels in print:

“Return of the Lloigor” by Colin Wilson in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) [mentioned here]
The Face in the Frost John Anthony Bellairs (1969) [mentioned here]
Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone Max McCoy (1994) [mentioned here]
The Grinning Ghost Brad Strickland (1999) [mentioned here]
Enoch’s Portal A.W.Hill (2001) [my review]
Popco Scarlett Thomas (2004) [my review]
The Magician’s Death Paul C. Doherty (2004) [mentioned here]
Shattered Icon (2004) / Splintered Icon (2006) Bill Napier [mentioned here]
Codex Lev Grossman (2005) [mentioned here]
Vellum Matt Rubinstein (2007) [my review]

Forthcoming Voynich novels:

“The Castle of the Stars” Enrique Joven [mentioned here and here]
“The Source” Michael Cordy [mentioned here]
“In Tongues of the Dead” Brad Kelln [mentioned here]

Voynich novels in development (working titles where known):

Richard D. Weber [mentioned here and here]
Bill Walsh [mentioned here]
William Michael Campbell (“The Voynich Solution”) [mentioned here and here]
Andrea Peters (“I’m Sorry… Love Anne”) [mentioned here]