So there's a political blog I read (Matt Yglesias's at ThinkProgress) that recently had a piece up about another pundit griping about the DaVinci Code being seen as literary trash instead of vicious attacks on the Catholic Church, arguing that the same treatment applied to Islam or Judaism would be seen as horrifyingly bigoted. Yglesias responded that the Church just happens to have a long enough consistent centralized structure to be a useful hook on which to hang dopey-fun conspiracy tales, a rigid structure that's absent in the other faiths. He mentioned "The Eight" as his favorite historical conspiracy fiction novel, adding that it "takes aim at the Freemasons, a group that seems to have been invented precisely to provide fodder for good conspiracy theories. Plus, it also involves accounting improprieties!"
So, good enough for me! It's summer and I like me some dumb National Treasure-style romps that posit "What if the Founding Fathers were, like, hiding sculptures and only created a sovereign nation as an afterthought?" Grabbed The Eight at the library and dove in.
And guys, it's just not that fun, at least to me. Neville is WAY into the idea that she's never met a conspiracy romp that wouldn't be improved by adding nearly every historical figure available to the mix, so over the course of the book we see Napoleon, Catherine the Great, Robespierre, Marat, Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, Charlemagne, Kadafi, Voltaire, Bach, Euler, and oh god I don't want to name everybody, but come on. It passes from amusingly-unhinged to exhausting pretty early on.
Neville is also big on piling as many codes and secret messages into the book as possible, laying on eights with a gleeful abandon. If you thought Lost's makers had a lot of fun inserting The Numbers wherever they needed a number, just wait til you see how many eights crop up in this book (or how many floors are described as "chessboard"s, culminating with the protagonist's realization that ZOMG the floor in her friends' home really DOES look like a chess board!).
Anyways, there are some books like this that, in their last twists, make you go "oh, that's clever" or tie things shut in a way that makes you appreciate the structure of it, but this ain't it -- everything seems too obvious too early, so when the ending comes (with some bizarre details that aren't quite plausible even in this deranged reality) it's a letdown.
So anyways, I'm 0-for-1 on delightful light summer reads. Anyone who has suggestions for better options in this field, let me know! I like to balance my reading out, and so far Nixonland is proving to be the feel-good hit of the summer in comparison...
No comments:
Post a Comment