In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) “Rack Pack” writers, (2) “Domain Experts”, or (3) “Wannabe Screenwriters”. Having read Steve Berry’s book “The Templar Legacy” (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his “The Charlemagne Pursuit” (2008), where the serial use of the main character ‘Cotton Malone’ places Berry firmly amongst the Rack Pack. But is he Rack the Knife or Rack the Hack?

The first thing I’d say is that The Charlemagne Pursuit is definitely put together far better than its predecessor, whose cardboard Bond-world characters such as ‘Cassiopeia Vitt’ (who it seems unfortunately reappears in later Cotton Malone books) and ghastly Templar clichés reduced the art of reading from a pleasure to a struggle. Really, compared with the sparky horses-in-the-New-York-museum start to Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar“, Berry’s The Templar Legacy remained ungrippingly pedestrian throughout.

All the same, The Charlemagne Pursuit is no less stuffed with airport mystery fodder – beautiful Nazi-family twin sisters, ancient architectural hints, buried clues, castles, Atlantis, Ahnenerbe, secret submarines, Voynich Manuscript-style documents, professional killers, unlikeable protagonist, etc. Yet what I found most frustrating is that if you stripped out all the history / lost civilizations / Nazi / mad admiral guff, the raw core of the story – Cotton Malone hunting down his dead submariner father, with surprising success – would be basically OK. And so I felt at the end that I’d read a decent-enough 100-page book ripped into a 600-pager by a sustained ingestion of airport novel steroids.

For sure, Berry’s book fully deserves its place in my Big Fat List as probably the highest-profile Voynich Manuscript novel yet: but the VMs is mainly treated as a kind of codicological template to help generate the various mysterious books Berry’s narrative requires along the way, rather than actually engaged with in any interesting or intriguing manner – not actually disdain, but certainly something close to disinterest. And perhaps it’s just me, but there’s also something just a bit desperate about his scattergun constructional style, which comes across not unlike a neurotic parent grabbing every soft toy in turn to try to placate an unhappy toddler. Ultimately, I’d rather read a book with half (if not less!) as many themes weaved together but explored in a more engaging way: but perhaps that’s a grossly unreasonable expectation of the genre, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

In summary, I did enjoy bits of it: but most of it came across as a Nazi-themed rollercoaster ride where you don’t care much for any of the twists and turns, let alone the characters.

This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you’d expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the ‘airport novel’ end of the spectrum than the ‘lit-rit-cher’ end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello’s “God’s Comic” as he finally meets his Maker:-

So there He was on a water-bed
Drinking a cola of a mystery brand
Reading an airport novelette
Listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s “Requiem”

Nicely pitched scansion, and perhaps even more richly ironic if the airport novelette in question happened to have one of those interminably Byzantine two-millennia-long-conspiracy-to-hide-the-truth-about-Jesus’-non-death-on-the-cross plotlines we’re so waerily familiar with now. But I digress!

Wearing my book publisher hat, I’d say you can divide cipher mystery airport novel writers into three quite distinct camps:-

  1. The Rack Pack. People who write strings of pacy, mostly character-driven novels but who scout around for interesting historical stuff to build their fantastical plotting and obscure conspiracies around. (These books tend to suffer from “slabs”, i.e. lumps of undigested Wikipedia-style research littering the text, and to rely heavily on secondary characters who ‘just happen’ to be world-renowned Harvard Professors of Obscure Historical Linguistics etc. They can also be quite hard to tell apart).
  2. Domain Experts. People who happen to be experts in some technical / research field and fall victim to the questionable notion that a particular historical mystery that happens to overlap their field would make an amazing basis for a novel, but then decide to write that book. I mean, how hard can it be? (These books tend to suffer from inexpert plotting, clunky characterization, and non-credible relationships between characters. But at least most of the technical details are right).
  3. Wannabe Screenwriters. People who are terrifically personally ambitious and have a deep love of film, and who see the airport novel medium as a great way to express their high-octane visual imagination, while also giving themselves an outside chance of their books’ being optioned for a Major Motion Picture. (These books tend to be bad on just about every level you can name, but are probably a terrifically good read if you’re the kind of person who has a copy of “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft” in your toilet).

All of which is a fairly longwinded way of introducing David Gibbins’ (2005) novel “Atlantis”. From the moment you read that the author “has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life” and that “[this] is his first novel“, you can be pretty sure that this is going to fall squarely into Camp #2 territory.

The cipher connection isn’t hard to work out: the front cover has a gold-embossed representation of something not unlike the Phaistos Disk, though it has to be said that the shapes are upside-down (relative to the real Phaistos Disk) and in a quite different order, while a few other plausible-looking pictogram-style shapes have been added to the mix. Though that’s OK, because these differences are part of the story (which kicks off with a second Phaistos Disk being discovered in an ancient shipwreck, but this time it’s made of gold).

Commendably, the spine of the book has one of the Phaistos Disc symbols (which Gibbins has both as “outstretched eagle god” and as the sign of “Atlantis”, though note that he requires you rotate it 90 degrees to see it even slightly as a bird), making it the only cipher novel I know of with a single genuine historical cipher mystery character shape as its central motif. Please tell me if there’s another one!

There’s actually a bit of literature on this shape, which is #21 in Sir Arthur Evans’ much-noted list of the disk’s pictograms. Here are some of the better-known theories about it proposed over the years:-

  • Comb (Godart, 1995)
  • Weaving comb (Dettmer, 1989)
  • Hoe or rake (Aartun, 1992)
  • Palace floor-plan (not sure who suggested this?)
  • Swedish rock carvings of a team of plowing oxen (Woudhuizen, !?!?!?!?)

More usefully, Balistier (2000) notes that Ingo Pini (1970) pointed out that this particular pictogram very likely has Minoan origins, as evidenced by the similarities between it and a five-toothed comb design found on clay fragment HM 992 (also found at Phaistos, and dating to the 18th century BC).  And here it is:-

HM-992

Clay fragment HM 1992: the five-pronged comb-like shape is on the left

 This striking visual parallel is often cited as proof of the Phaistos Disk’s authenticity, with the only small problem being that it may well be that Luigi Pernier ‘excavated’ them both… but that’s another story entirely.

Anyway, does Gibbins manage to save himself from falling into all the Domain Expert airport novel traps? Actually… no. And what’s worse, from the minute the protagonist Jack Howard (“unlikely scion of one of England’s most ancient families“, p.13) makes “a mental note to email the image to Professor James Dillen, his old mentor at Cambridge University and the world’s leading authority on the ancient scripts of Greece” (p.16), it’s abundantly clear that Gibbins has drunk too deeply from the Rack Pack’s well of clichés. Moreover, from the breathless military helicopter fetishism and Wired editorialese, he has dipped his bucket into the Wannabe Screenwriters’ gadget-strewn watering hole more than a few times as well.

All of which superficial nonsense I could actual forgive Gibbins for (it is, after all, an airport novel, and many top-tier writers have fallen into these same traps over the years). However (and sorry if this is a spoiler) the point near the end where Jack Howard unilaterally fires a nuclear warhead onto the bad guys’ hi-tech hide-out is just not OK by me. Yes, they killed his friends, etc etc: but a nuclear warhead? Really? Really??

It’s at this point the alert reader stops to wonder whether the whole book is some kind of high-camp “The Producers” so-bad-it’s-good joke, or some knowing Alan Sokal hoax on the airport novel genre, or perhaps even some Umberto Eco-esque prolonged literary inversion. Though these all sound fairly unbelievable, the alternative – that the author really thinks that this kind of stuff is OK – is so much worse that it’s not really conceivable. And once you’ve ruled out the impossible…

I remember when I first saw the “Roger Bacon Manuscript”: Wilfrid Voynich brought it with him to Philadelphia for his lecture back in 1921 – my old friend Bill Newbold was there, taking in every word, nodding like the crazy-but-brilliant spiritualist and Antioch-obsessed nutter he was. So it just had to be Bacon behind it all, right? I sat at the back, laughing quietly: but all the same, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something rather disconcerting about the whole thing that demanded being checked out at a convenient point…

My big break came in late 1929, in a chance visit to New York: though charming as ever, Voynich was already sickly, well along the path to his own deathbed. Though he was unwilling at first, I convinced him to let me take a closer look at his manuscript’s oh-so-boring quire 13 – why not, what could a lowly UPhil Italian academic possibly find of interest there? Yet behind the scenes, I’d had help from Johnny Manly and Edith Rickerts: though they’d initially tried to dissuade me from looking closely, I’d carefully zoomed in on the bits they were most intrigued by – and with stunning results. They’d been so utterly wrong to think it was Latin (hardly surprising, given that they were arch-Latinists), when I’d instead worked out it was mostly an abbreviated Italian scribal shorthand…

But honestly – how could I not remember the day when Hans Kraus pitched up to Yale with the 1428 Albergati bible ($204,000, and worth every cent) along with Wilfrid’s “ugly duckling” manuscript. Old man Beinecke had come along for the ride, too: everyone there was trembling with excitement – but I swear nobody could have been sweating like me. If only they knew how I felt! Once dear old Annie Nill had sold it to HPK, I’d worked out where things were leading and had networked my way into the position as Beinecke curator – so my first unofficial job was to remove it from the stacks, to give myself the opportunity of making sense of quire 20‘s recipes for myself. But sad to say, I never quite did, and so my last job there was to retire.

All the same, I have to give a big hooray for the Beinecke’s hi-res scans: though I’d really thought my second act was over (and so did wife #7), with a bit of help from Steve Ekwall I finally managed to get Voynich’s other fountain working. Whoever it was that said that diligence has its own rewards was really onto something – it certainly works for me!

And so here I am once again, back to square #1 and wife #8. Sure, I do my best to prevent anyone on the Voynich mailing list from coming even close to reproducing what I found: but everyone thinks I’m just some kind of ultra-informed troll, and they back off from the truth. Which suits me 100%.

Here’s to wife #9!

EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.

NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.

AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?

NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?

AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.

CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?

AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…

 CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.

CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…

AGENT
So…

CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?

AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.

CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?

AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …

CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?

AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.

CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…

AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.

CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…

Excitement surged loudly through Imperial College’s Great Hall as the announcer belatedly bellowed those four terrifying words, signifying what for one side would be the beginning of the end: “Sssseconds out, Rrrrround One!

Danny grabbed Charles Hope’s arm: “Am I going to be able to do this?”, he asked. “Do you really think I’ve learnt enough to last five rounds… against him?

Relax“, said the Professor languidly as he stepped out through the ropes, “Iconologists are a pushover – they’re all talk. Your informed historical cynicism should win every time.

“That ‘should‘ word again”, thought Danny with more than a flicker of fear. “Why couldn’t he use something stronger, at a time when I really need moral certainty?”

He rose slowly, trying not to look intimidated by the leviathan bulging menacingly out of the far corner. Sure, Raza Reema was ‘only’ a student iconologist at the Courtauld Institute – but, let’s face it, the guy had an extra stone, two inches of reach and a whole extra post-doc year on Danny. Raza’s second, the formidable Joscelyn Godwin, flicked Danny a hostile glance as he eased himself out of the ring – yes, this was going to be every bit as tough as the TLS preview had predicted.

Yet for over three years, Danny had trained hard for this by grinding his way along each open shelf of the Warburg Institute, exhaustively dredging every book and photo for scraps that might prove decisive tonight – ironically using Aby Warburg’s creation to try to defeat its own research programme. With Hope as his mentor, wimpy post-grad Danny had bloomed into a research golem, equal parts fighting machine and rabbinical debating monster. Under the glare of the Channel 4 cameras, with the funding of the two institutions balancing precariously on the outcome, now was no time to be entertaining doubts.

Rather, it was time to fight – to kill or be killed.

And so the two boxers lurched defiantly towards the centre of the ring, the bell and the crowd’s roar ringing in their ears.

Iconology is a joke“, snapped Danny as he jabbed quickly at Raza’s ribs, “and you know what? The joke’s on you.

Cynicism is a losing path“, retorted Raza flashing shots close to Danny’s face, “that’s more about supposed intellectual safety than bravery. And lamers such as you are neither safe nor brave.”

Danny snapped his head back as a fast cross punch came close to his nose. For an instant, he paused: he thought he could smell something strange and pungent – Paco Rabanne? Juicy Fruit? Myrrh? No time to wonder, as he launched himself back to the fray.

Speculation without evidence is wasted research funding“, Danny barked grimly through his gumshield, circling lightly around the ring, “and you’ve wasted your life on a dream.

Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” pingponged Raza, feinting to the left. “But funnily enough, you and your crew are pretty short of persuasive evidence too.” Uncoiling quickly, he unwound a powerful right hook that skidded off Danny’s ear.

For someone so convinced by their thesis, you’re taking a notably nihilistic position“, sneered Danny, tucking himself down inside Raza’s defences to snatch a fast body blow, rocking him on his heels. He smiled to himself as he glimpsed Professor Hope in the corner nodding in obvious appreciation. “Are we really debating in an evidential vacuum?

Raza pulled back, slowing the tempo right down. “You know there’s evidence”, he sneered, “it’s more a matter of what evidence you choose to believe. Authoritas, eh?

The bell sounded and the two fighters decamped to their respective corners. “You need to start landing more body blows on the guy“, urged Professor Hope, rubbing Danny’s shoulders briskly with a Mnemosyne-emblemmed towel. “He’s got the reach, but you’ve got the research focus – time to take the fight right to him.” Danny narrowed his sweat-filled eyes across the ring: though Professor Godwin was fingering his bow-tie agitatedly, Raza seemed unmoved, as grimly powerful as ever.

Rrrrround Two!” shrieked the announcer, the two professors vacated their corners, and the contest started once more.

Splendor Solis“, Danny called out as he surged forward with a string of jabs towards his opponent’s chest, “is merely eye candy for the soul, feel-good alchemy for the rich: a Renaissance God’s way of telling you you have too much money and too little sense.

Raza stumbled, taken aback by the force of Danny’s full-frontal attack on his 2007 paper. His mind darted through his extensive bibliography reaching for an obvious refutation, but it all came far too late as Danny ploughed in with a tight one-two to Raza’s solar plexus and chin, sending the Courtauld man backwards onto the canvas and up again for a standing count.

Out of the corner of his eye, Danny could Professor Hope gesticulating to him with his hands, as though he were kneading some kind of symbolic dough. Dough? Meaning money? But surely it was time to finish Raza off?

Immediately the referee signalled for them to resume, Danny hurled himself forward at his opponent, trying to capitalize on his momentary advantage. “What’s the matter?“, he taunted. “The Rosicrucians got your tongue?

Cheap trick, Warburg kiddy“, blocked Raza, quickly clubbing Danny’s leading shoulder – the sheer force from the straight blow sent him reeling backwards to the ropes, the shock wave rattling right through to his knees. All at once, he felt his will to win this contest waver, even though four years’ research funding for the Warburg was at stake on its outcome. Has there ever been a fairer way to allocate resources?

However, a steel-edged glance from Professor Hope was enough to push him back to his full height. He then realized his mentor had just now been signalling him to slow the pace down, and not to get too excited – of course, he should have known that Hope wouldn’t try to communicate symbolically, particularly in an arena like this.

The two fighters now stood just beyond an arms’ length from each other, slowly pedalling around, regrouping their thoughts, angling to finding their key technical points of differences.

So… do you accept that Cesare Ripa made up his emblems“, Danny jabbed quickly, trying to tuck himself beneath Raza’s long reach, “and hence that Panofsky built his iconological castles on sand?

I’m cool with that“, scowled Raza as he dropped back a step, firing off a whistling blow close to Danny’s head, “but are you OK with the idea of Lorenzo de’ Medici being a uber-revivalist, a politicking Platonist insider?

Uh huh“, Danny nodded darkly, stepping sideways around Raza, “so… what exactly is the difference between us? Do you accept that your Splendor Solis paper was perhaps an over-positivistic iconological presentation of a medieval conceit?”

“Well…“, Raza pondered, also slowing down in the ring, “three years on, I would take a very much more nuanced view of it. My funding specified that I had to construct an iconological case, but it really wasn’t easy.

Danny suddenly stopped in his tracks, dropping his guard. “So they set you up for this whole thing?”, he said in disbelief. “They locked down your PhD subject, even seconded Joscelyn Godwin in… just because you had ripped abs and could punch for their money?”

“Basically, yes. And what about you?”, queried Raza, similarly dropping his gloves to his sides. “I heard that in your first year at the Warburg you were ‘pagan this’, ‘Edgar Wind that’. How did they get you to switch sides so comprehensively?

Yeah…“, replied Danny, “even though all that stuff ‘felt right’, I just couldn’t construct an historical case to support it, and in the end felt I had to drop it. As always, the truth lies in the cracks between.” By now, the packed crowd was starting to boo at the lack of action, and even the referee was edging over to see what was wrong. “Anyway, what aftershave does Professor Godwin wear?”

“Aftershave?“, said Raza in surprise. “Ummm… Paco Rabanne, I think. Why’s that?”

“Actually, I think I smelt some on your gloves“, said Danny.

Really? On my gloves?” said Raza, reaching down to sniff them.

It was at that precise moment that Danny’s devastatingly strong uppercut hit Raza square beneath his chin, knocking him clean out cold.

Job done!“, shouted Danny in triumph, as the referee and Charles Hope held up his arms.

I told you iconologists are a pushover“, said the Professor sideways.

Yeah, they’ll believe anything you tell ’em“, said Danny, “Anything at all!

* * * * *

[PS: all names, places, and institutions in this story are utterly fictitious, even when they’re plainly not.]

Here’s something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could “That’s Life, Samara Brooks” be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I’ll be sure to get a copy along the way… and will let you know. 🙂

Incidentally, Google Books also returns a hit for “Voynich” in Frank Portman’s (2009) similarly-genred children’s book “Andromeda Klein“, but I suspect that the VMs will turn out to be less central to the plot there. Just in case there are any completist Voynich teen novel collectors out there. 🙂

Though I’m not sure from the blurb whether it’s a literary detective story or a love story (it might well be both), Tristan Marechal’s (2007) “Sous le manteau de la nuit” definitely does feature the Voynich Manuscript. The protagonists accidentally discover a painting in the (Florentine, not Venetian) Galleria dell’Accademia’s reserve stock that just happens to contain some Voynichese lettering, and (presumably) everything leads on from there.

At least Dennis Stallings will have something nice to put on his Christmas list this year. 🙂

About a month ago, I mentioned here that there was an upcoming episode of “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” with a Voynich theme. Well… this aired on ZDF on 5th November 2009, and (with a tip of the hat to Michael Johne’s voynichlupe blog) here’s a link to the “Das Voynich-Manuskript” episode online so that you can watch it yourself.

It’s one of those programmes where the main characters are pretty much so well-defined that you don’t actually need to understand German to make sense of what’s going on. The only bit that I didn’t quite get is how Pater Castell used the page from the book from the school library to decipher the note on the noticeboard (yes, Charles, it does sound like a text adventure).

Having gone to a boy’s school myself (though since it went fully co-ed, Brentwood’s most famous ‘old boy’ is now Jodie Marsh, horror of horrors), I have to say that the most implausible bit of the episode was the way that the sexy Münchner detective Marie Blank walked around the school in tight white jeans without any of the sixth formers giving her a second look. Oh well… artistic licence, I s’pose.

For maximum Voynich spotter points, have your copy of “Le Code Voynich” open to page f52v, and observe the nine vaguely fern-ish leaf-swirls rolling over as they branch off a single vertical stem – though quite why Pater Castell mumbles “Kabbalah” to himself as he looks at this page is a little beyond me (sorry, but to my eyes it doesn’t resemble the Ten Sephiroth at all). For what it’s worth (typically £9.95 + p&p), I suspect that this page is a late “A” page, and was part of the Voynich author’s transitional phase which used the ‘A’ language  and fake plants to represent other things – in this case, a fountain.

f52v-comparison

One question that bugged me throughout the episode was… whom exactly did the main character remind me of? It took me right until the end to work out the alchemical wedding from whence Pater Castell (played by Francis Fulton-Smith) seems to have sprung…

segal-joly-fultonsmith

Yes, he’s the offspring of Steven Seagal and Dom Joly. Watch it for yourself and see if you agree.

And finally: structurally, “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” reminded me of another well-known TV series which  combines two strong main characters’ arbitrarily flying around in a light aircraft with blocky expositions of things that are mysteries to its (admittedly slightly younger) viewers, all sweetened by a bit of light drama. I’m referring, of course, to “Come Outside” (1994), featuring Lynda Baron (as Aunt Mabel) and her clever dog Pippin – a far more rounded role than her appearances on Eastenders as Jane Beale’s mum. (Though I d-d-doubt Arkwright would accuse Nurse Gladys Emanuel of being anything but fully rounded.)

For reference, Pippin’s the one without the goggles. Actually, “Come Outside” is a sweet little series for kids, and I hope it continues to be shown until at least the year 2999. 🙂

Alas, sometimes the limitations of Twitter are all too apparent. The follow-up to my previous VMs limerick simply refuses to be shoehorned inside the 140 character limit:-

A dodgy bookdealer called Wilfrid
Hotly denied he had pilfered
Or hoaxed, faked or shammed
His “
Book Of The Damned
(That he’d bought off a geezer in Ilford)

Alternatively…

Did the Emperor purchase “The Voynich”
For 600 ducats of coinage?
Perhaps he had hoped
It described a strange soap
That would cure his mysterious groin itch!

Ah well, perhaps blogs aren’t so bad after all! 🙂

A couple of upcoming Voynich Euro-novels for your brief attention: firstly, the Spanish “El caso Voynich” (i.e. “The Voynich Case”) from Argentinian writer and columnist Daniel Guebel. Though references to it seem to have been temporarily removed from Guebel’s website, it appears to be based on contemporary-ish Voynich research, and may even include some VMs images. Due out next month (November 2009).

And secondly, “Engels Fall” (i.e. Fallen AngelsAngel’s Fall” or “Angel’s Case”) by Helena Reich has a qualmless secret society leaving a trail of corpses across Prague, each with a tarot card signature… might a mysterious order of alchemists hold the missing pages of the VMs? Prague Post reporter Larissa Khek (the heroine of Reich’s earlier book “Watery Grave”)  is determined to find out [etc, etc]. Due out in two months’ time (December 2009).