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?

It shouldn’t really be news, but journalism lecturer Max McCoy (author of the “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” novel) dropped a link to my review into his blog, calling (and then apologizing for having called) Voynich News “geeky”. Gee, how should I retaliate? Perhaps I’ll have to call him “cheeky” for quoting 75% of my review in his posting, but then apologize for doing so. :-p

Regardless, it’s nice to get a response: blogging can be somewhat dispiriting, mainly from the resounding lack of feedback (this blog gets about 1 comment for every 10 posts, which is perhaps a little bit low). Publishers are more interested in the Times Literary Supplement and/or Richard & Judy, and rarely send bloggers review copies; journalists hate bloggers (basically, for undercutting them); academics seem wary of bloggers to the point of enforced mutism; while bloggers are mainly courted by other bloggers working on their PageRank.

Or maybe people are a bit scared of me, because I take in so many different types of stuff and try to make sense of them all as a whole, in an era when people enjoy the cubicle comfort of specialized knowledge.

Or perhaps I produce closed readings which people are not interested enough in to feel the urge to pass any comment on?

Or might I be the only person that finds this stuff interesting?

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.

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.