Review of "PopCo"…

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I’m a lousy fiction reviewer, probably for two main reasons: (1) creative writing classes taught me how to spot when writers are cheating (in order to make me a more honest writer myself); and (2) years of Voynich Manuscript-related research has made me constantly alert for infinitesimal details upon which the answer might just hinge.

Put these two together (a lie-detector and an adrenaline-fuelled eye for detail), and you have a completely unfair toolkit for reading novels, simply because novels are very rarely actually “novel” – they’re more often an assembly of ideas.

Take Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo” (FourthEstate, 2004), for example. Superficially, it’s like a 500-page anagram of my life (BBC Micro / chess / maths / philosophy / Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem / videogames / business / marketing / cryptography / cryptology / secret history / Voynich Manuscript / etc), together with a load of other untaken doors (Bletchley Park / SOE / crosswords / vegetarianism / vegan / Go / low-level drug-use / homeopathy / etc), and it’s written quite well: so I really should be engaged by it, right?

Problem #1 is one of construction: the first tranche is basically Douglas Coupland (specifically Microserfs), the second tranche Iain Banks (his fiction rather than his science fiction), then a bit of Martin Gardner’s puzzle columns and Simon Singh’s The Code Book: there’s a kind of teenage girls’ magazine section along the way, and a rather clunky historical pirate romance, before it all flips out into Thomas’ fictional take on Naomi Klein’s No Logo… Yet to me, a book needs to be more than merely a collage of influences, a narrated scrapbook: but perhaps that makes me too old-fashioned for contemporary fiction. If you wanted to be kind, you might compare it with Kurt Schwitters‘ Merz, carefully arranged collections of found objects (forged Merz pieces get placed on eBay all the time): but sorry, Thomas is no Schwitters.

Problem #2 is the lack of parents. The other day, while watching (the original TV series of) Batman on BBC4, my four-year-old son asked me where Batman came from. Well, I said, a man called the Joker killed both Bruce Wayne’s parents, and when a bat bit him in the caves beneath his mansion, he somehow gained a super crime-fighting ability. OK… so where did Spiderman come from? Well, I said, after both Peter Parker’s parents died, he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and gained amazing spider-like powers. My son paused, looking back at the screen. But what about Robin, he asked. No, don’t tell me, I know: both his parents were killed… Before he had a chance to say “(and he was bitten by a radioactive robin)”, I suggested we look Robin up on Wikipedia (though sadly he was basically correct). In PopCo, the main character Alice Butler is basically Crypto Girl, a sort of Elonka-lite: her mother dies and her dad runs away, and she gains her m4d cryptological and prime factorisation sk1llz from her grandad. Put it that way, and it all looks a bit comic-book thin, doesn’t it?

Problem #3 is that I’m wise to novelistic conceits. I know that in a cryptological novel, someone called A[lice] is going to communicate with someone called B[en], who will pass on what she says to someone called C[hloe]: and this kind of spoils it. Incidentally, Ron Rivest denies that he used “Alice” and “Bob” (in his 1978 paper introducing RSA public-key cryptography) in any kind of homage to the film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (which is actually a bit of a shame). It would also have been cool if PopCo’s Alice had been born in 1978 and openly named in crypto homage to Ron Rivest’s paper, but I think she’s too old (is she 29? I can’t find the page, rats!).

Problem #4: cringeworthy logic/maths puzzles. To give texture to her story, Thomas brings together loads of lateral puzzles and mathematical ain’t-that-amazin’ fragments, the kind of thing that you sometimes hear being trotted out at student parties. For example:-Two men go into a restaurant and order the same dish from the menu. After tasting his food, one of the men goes outside and immediately shoots himself. Why? (p.109) The explanation given for this in PopCo is ludicrous (it involves an albatross and a dead child, don’t get me started): but why is one not simply a food-taster for the other? Fugu: mmm, delicious… hey, what’s that trainee doing in the kitchen… aaaarrgggh!

Problem #5 (probably the biggest of all for a Voynichologist) is that PopCo uses the Voynich Manuscript as a MacGuffin (or do I mean a “Philosopher’s Egg MacGuffin”?). Alice’s grandfather spends years on the VMs, and even gets her to count the words and letters on each page (and later to factorise large numbers): perhaps washing his car would have been a better way to earn pocket money. Alice says that she’s learnt so much from the journey, from the search for the heart of the VMs: but really the manuscript is no more than occasional wallpaper for the narrative. The Beale Papers also make a brief appearance: my guess is that Scarlett Thomas would have used them as the central hook, had there been more than a paltry $20million dollars’ worth of treasure linked to them: the alternative “Stevenson/Heath” pirate cipher mystery Thomas constructs is a bit thin when held up against real ones, regardless of the size of its haul.

…and so on. I feel in a bad place: I really wanted to like PopCo, but all I can do is whinge (and I haven’t even moaned about her merging Alberti’s and Vigenere’s cryptography, etc). Other reviewers (such as here and here) seem basically to like the book: and compared to Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (where I wanted to kill all the main characters by the end of Chapter One, all the minor characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publishers by the end of Chapter Three) it’s Shakespeare.

Cryp-lit like this requires a certain kind of technical devotion from the reader, and if you are a diehard crypto-geek PopCo is something you really ought to read. But only if you’ve read the good stuff (like Neal Stephenson’s excellent Cryptonomicon) first.

The "visual poetry" of the Voynich Manuscript…

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It must seem like I’m fixating on everything apart from the VMs itself, but sometimes that’s how blogging works: and, indeed, how life itself works. This June 2005 entry from visual poet Geof Huth’s “dbqp: visualizing poetry” blog takes a confidently sideways angle on the manuscript from most people.

Geof talks of the Voynich’s “hypnotic beauty” and wonders whether “the draw of this book is that we must treat it as a child treats a picture book: We read the images and look at the text.” Yet I happen to believe that there is more visual poetry to be found in the VMs than even he thinks, many miles beyond the limited horizons of “The Friar and the Cipher” (which he had just read).

Geof also suggests that the VMs might have influenced the DIY cultural anarchist mIEKAL aND. Certainly, there’s some visual overlap with the fonts here (one grabbed from the Rohonczi Codex), but as for the VMs’ influence on the “crossmedia beliefware” here, his Zaum Gadget and other hypertoys at Qazingulaza, and according to this page, “THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA, a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower“, I really couldn’t say.

I’d never really thought of it before just now, but to me the Voynich does have the same kind of deep structure as poetry: that ineffable feeling of polished granite blocks effortlessly grinding past each other in an unseen topology, far below the surface. And a kind of coruscating anti-etymology too, that elegantly hunts down and destroys the patterns our magpie eyes feverishly search out.

Burning flames, dead stars humming:
Rhythm of a dance? Each thing
Is lost inside this packed-in future –
The one you tried to grasp so much.
We throw our words, our empty hopes,
And foolish dreams upon this pyre,
To keep you living in your fire.

Make of it all what you will.

"Codex", by Lev Grossman…

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“Codex” (2005) , another Voynich-ish thriller to add to the Big Fat List, is by New-York-based writer Lev Grossman who you might know as the author of the “When Words Fail” article (a nice introduction to the Voynich Manuscript) in April 1999’s Lingua Franca I have favourably cited here several times.

In his novel, an investment banker gets roped in by a wealthy couple to track down a medieval travel narrative, which may or may not be a fraud. Lev’s website says (of his own book) that “It’s also an unusual love story, as well as a love letter to the mysteries and wonders of the Book, the death of which has been wildly exaggerated“: sounds plausible to me. 🙂

Oh, and it genuinely does appear to be an international bestseller, as evidenced by the 25 copies of it in my local libraries (where most interesting books don’t even merit a single copy, sadly).

"Codice Voynich", by Claudio Foti…

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There’s a new book just out, self-published through lulu.com, called “Codice Voynich” by Claudio Foti. It’s 143 pages long, 6″ x 9″, and in Italian – though fewer pages, it has the same dimensions as the VMs and, who knows, perhaps even the same language. 😉

But printing is basically easy now: and so the big issue for publishers and self-publishers is sales and marketing – getting people to buy your wares. Yet for print-on-demand business wrappers like Lulu, the economics are somewhat suspect: unless you’ve got absolutely killer content that large numbers of people need right now and can be compressed into a tiny number of pages (like, say, “Getting Laid with Facebook“), who is going to pay £13.15 for a softback? Yeah, Voynich completists like me, sure: but are there really more than 20-30 of those in the world?

For my own Voynich book, I worked out that for digital printing to make good economic sense, it could sensibly have no more than 240 pages, and I could charge no more than £9.95 per copy, no matter what I actually put inside it. And so I’ll be very interested to see what makes Claudio’s book worth more for 90+ less pages.

Incidentally, typical keywords Claudio has flagged are: magic alchemy Prague Rome medieval Middle Ages manuscript codex Atlantis Bacon Kelley mysterious rune Lovecraft Necronomicon Nostradamus Dee Voynich. No huge surprises there: which itself is a bit of a shame. If it had been “Voynich Facebook Smurf Cheeseboard Helicopter“, well…

Yet more Voynich "solutions"…

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I recently found a German Voynich Lexicon wiki-page, with lots of nice things that appear almost nowhere else (such as a link to my Compelling Press Voynich book page, *sigh*).

It has quite a light touch, reminiscent of my old Voynich friend Elmar Vogt: for example, it has a short “Newbold of the month” section pointing to two latter-day Voynich “solutions”, neither of which I’d heard: Erhard Landmann’s book, and Dirk Schroeder’s kabbalistic numerology.

Perhaps more usefully, the site also has a list of Voynich media mentions, going from 2001 all the way up to 2008. OK, it’s in German: but even so, you can get a good idea of what’s being said about the VMs (and where). There’s a link there to a 2007 Suddeutsche article I was interviewed for (and which I’d forgotten about until I saw it there just now).

But here’s the punchline: the more Voynich coverage from around the world I see, the more it seems to me that the English-speaking world doesn’t currently give a monkey’s about the whole issue. With all due respect to the army of novelists out there slaving away on their Voynich-themed soon-to-be-masterpieces, you might consider avoiding making them too parochial: the translations may well make you more money…

Incidentally, I’m now 50 pages into Scarlett Thomas’ novel “PopCo”: I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve finished it…

Dutch Voynich hoax bloggery…

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I just stumbled across part 1 and part 2 of a long-ish Dutch blog entry on hoax theories of the Voynich Manuscript, specifically Gordon Rugg’s Cardan grille nonsense. If, like me, you don’t speak Dutch, note that Google Translate‘s Dutch-to-English translation appears not to be working, and so use FreeTranslation.com instead (which does work fine).

Actually, I do (thanks to Tanya) have a single Amsterdam survival phrase, which I learnt long before I was married: “Zeker niet, mevrouw: ik word getrouwd!” Anyway, moving swiftly on…

What tickled me about the Dutch bloggery was the fact that the people commenting on it were amused by f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” sequence, with one of them asking “Wat dacht je van de smurfen?” All of which prompted (Proust-stylee) long-buried memories of the abysmal Smurf collectible figurines BP gave away as promotional items in the 1970s (and which are doubtless now worth the GDP of Morocco each) to surface. I just never dreamed I’d join Smurfs and the Voynich Manuscript in the same sentence. Life is strange.

Incidentally, 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the Smurfs’ burf: thankfully, the movie tie-in has been delayed to 2010 (though if we’re really lucky, Paramount will cancel it first). But here’s a blog entry on them that does ring true (oh, and here’s a working Smurf Name Generator).

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" and the VMs…

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You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles – stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts – have (according to a piece in this week’s MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi’s PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than a million of which were in the UK. Oh, and the US box office release of the movie grossed nearly $25m: and there’s a computer game imminent, too.

LA-based blogger Martin van Velsen caught the film’s opening: and was struck by the title-sequence, during which Arthur Spiderwick constructs a book, one page every day, by gluing down small objects and animal (mostly insect) parts and writing a commentary around them. Martin wonders if the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript (both of which he describes as “pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control… [yet] based… on the real world“) were effectively the real Spiderwick Chronicles.

“When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?”

All good thoughts. He ends his blog with a rather splendid quote from H. P. Lovecraft:-

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

This whole blog entry warmed my heart, simply because here we have a blogger who really gets the Voynich. OK, he’s into H. P. Lovecraft and Luigi Serafini too, so it wasn’t a massive jump sideways: but all credit to him regardless. 🙂

Unreadable Chinese, revisited…

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Back in 1991, sardonic linguist Jacques Guy concocted a deliberately false theory about the Voynich, “to demonstrate how the absurd can be dressed in sensible garb“. His “Chinese Hypothesis” had Marco Polo bringing back two Chinese scholars to Venice, who wrote down their encyclopaedic knowledge into a book in some semi-improvised European script… you guessed it, Voynichese. He never believed his pet canard for a moment: it was a rhetorical gesture to the interpretative folly – which I call “the curse” – that surrounds the study of the manuscript.

But then in 1997, Brazilian computer science professor Jorge Stolfi pointed out that, actually, Voynichese as transcribed does share a lot of statistical properties with Mandarin Chinese texts. Though technically true, the problem is not its stats, but rather that the Voynich Manuscript is (with very little doubt) a fifteenth century European cultural artefact. Stats only indicate correlation, not causation: so all Stolfi’s results really say is that the Voynich Manuscript transcription correlates moderately well with certain Mandarin Chinese transcriptions. But lifting the abstracted text out of its codicological and stylistical contexts can easily give rise to the kind of plucking fallacy Gordon Rugg’s work suffers from. Is the statistical similarity Stolfi found in the texts themselves, or in the methodology used to design the two transcriptions? I suspect it may well be the latter: the map is not the territory.

So why am I so fascinated by the news that some indecipherable Chinese texts have recently been found? They don’t look anything like Voynichese (and why should they?): but they do look like a pictographic script not entirely dissimilar to Chinese. Their finder, 38-year-old Zhou Yongle, suspects they might be written by the Tujia, a large ethnic minority in mainland China which has a spoken language but (as far as anyone knew) no written one. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia asserts that Tujia is a Tibeto-Burman language with some similarities to Yi: but – come on – you’d have to be a pretty h4rdc0re linguist to know or care what that means.

No: what I find intriguing is that these texts do look precisely like the kind of cultural artefacts you would expect, with (real) Chinese annotations and marginalia. If Jacques wants a proper historical linguistic puzzle to get his teeth into, then this would surely be exactly the right kind of thing for him: honestly, where’s the fun in devising a Sokal-like hoax at self-mystificating Voynichologists, when they’re already more than capable of tying themselves in knots over essentially nothing?

Of course, we mustn’t forget the possibility that Zhou Yongle may (for whatever reason) have faked these unreadable documents. You may not have heard of the huge “paper tiger” scandal in China recently over photos of the South Chinese Tiger, believed to have been faked by hunter Zhou Zhenglong; or indeed the whole issue of the 1421 (1418/1763) map hoaxery, as ably deconstructed by Geoff Wade et al. Were all three simply ‘Made In China’? It’s a good question…

"Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can"…

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If you like Voynich-themed short stories, there’s most of one posted on the Analog website here. It’s called “Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can”, by Thomas R. Dulski: I mentioned it here a few days ago. Of course, the extract stops just at the point the story starts getting interesting, to try to get you to buy a copy of the April 2008 issue (where it appears in full): but that’s fair enough, I suppose.

Voynichologically, a few minor typos (“Athansius”, “Kirchner”, “Baresche”, etc), but it’s basically all there. Yet to my jaded eyes it reads like a brandname-laden faux-noir short story and a Wikipedia article whose pages have all been shuffled together, not unlike Herbal A and Herbal B.

Turning the whole Big Jim/UFO/Voynich link on its head (as the remainder of the story undoubtedly does) is a nice idea: but writing Voynich fiction is a desperately hard balancing act, and I can’t help but feel the attempt to shoehorn plot and history into a short story needs a lighter touch than this.

Two alternative histories vying for the mainstream…

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One noticeable thing about the Voynich Manuscript is how theories and hypotheses in the ‘cloud of the possible’ surrounding it are perpetually trying to enter the mainstream consciousness. From Gordon Rugg’s “Verifier” nonsense, to John Stojko’s Old Ukrainian, to Leo Levitov’s Cathar make-belief, even though they give it their best shot, the ramshackle pile of fairground cans they’re aimed at mysteriously fails to topple.

But this is far from unusual: many other well-known alt.history topics have resisted the best attempts of the gifted and brilliant to bring them to heel. And seeing as two separate assaults on these had stepped into the limelight this week, I thought I’d blog away, see where it goes…

First up is a new assault on the secret history of the Knights Templar here, published as a series of DVDs: its author, Barry Walker, has been researching neolithic sites for decades, and claims to bring out a whole new connection between these and the Knights Templar. DVD#1 opens up a new cave in Royston (to go with the well-known Templar-esque cave that is a tourist spot already): the subsequent 11 DVDs planned are described in fairly open terms.

The problem with this is that if you have already read Sylvia Beamon’s excellent “The Royston Cave: Used by Saints or Sinners?” (there’s a well-thumbed copy on my shelf), you’d know (a) that Sylvia has long pointed to sites within Royston that should be examined; (b) that these are likely to be little more than abandoned cellars; and moreover (c) that according to most Templar historians, the UK was only ever of marginal interest (as compared to, say, Languedoc).

I’d love it to be true that there was some kind of subtle iconological connection between the Knights Templars and neolithic sites: but I have to say this is right at the edge of the possible, if not over it. To be honest, unless there’s some truly amaaaaaazing evidence here, I think I’d rather buy into something a bit more plausibly mad (like the whole Titanic “insurance fraud” conspiracy theory) than this. All the same, a meagre £19.99 will buy you the first two DVDs of “The Quest”: and I’m sure it would be an entertaining diversion, if you like that kind of thing.

Second up is a rather more pleasantly gritty work of historical obsession. Tudor Parfitt spent 20+ years trying to track down the lost Ark of the Covenant: and, incredibly, appears to have found its 700-year-old duplicate/replacement in Harare. His book (“The Lost Ark of the Covenant“, to be published on 3rd March 2008 by HarperCollins) details the driven and (unavoidably) Indiana Jones-esque path he took along the way.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy with the ‘verie parfit Tudor’: he has clamped the meagre historical clues available to him in his bulldog-like jaws, and repeatedly stepped sideways with the subtle literary and DNA evidence available to him to give them colour, shape, depth – and hopefully to find the truth behind them all, whatever it happens to be. Though the hardback is £18.99 (if, inevitably, cheaper at Amazon etc), it’s something I’ll definitely be ordering: and will (of course) review here.