The logic is ineluctably Vulcan: unsolved historical ciphers are cool… novelists like to lard their books with cool stuff… ergo here’s yet another cipher mystery novel to review.

The book’s author, Jess Lourey, is a Sociology/English professor: and if I told you that she also lectures in creative writing, you may have a good idea of where this is going.

Firstly, the bad stuff: anyone who doesn’t like the sound of reading all-italics flashback chapters telling how the two main young women protagonists shared ice cream and cookies and tried different hair styles when they were growing up together probably isn’t going to be able to last to the end of the book. I certainly had to grit my teeth fairly hard to get through some of these. These bits were more chick than lit, let’s say.

Also, anyone who finds it difficult to buy in to novels where the main characters are stalked across the country by spectacularly sadistic and implausible assassins (say, like The Da Vinci Code) may find their copy of the book involuntarily sailing across the room at some point (personally, I found page 79 quite challenging in this respect).

The good news is that Lourey has done a fair bit of cipher mystery lurking and looking, and presents the Beale Ciphers reasonably accurately (I doubt I’d be spoiling anyone’s read if I said that various of the protagonists make their way to a well-known vault in Virginia).

Overall, though, the plot plays out like an all-female National Treasure remake, complete with national monuments, suitably appropriated historical figures, and more hidden compartments than you can shake Nic Cage’s torso at (there’s even Alcatraz in there for Cage completists). Though rather than Science vs Religion or Black vs White or Blue vs Red or even Humans vs Insects (Philip K. Dick short story reference), Lourey pitches Evil Rich Men vs Idealistic Poor Women as her two Conspiratorial axes. Which is nice.

Cryptologically, Salem’s Cipher itself (one of the protagonists is called Salem) appears at the start, where Salem figures out a way of using Charles Babbage’s work to power quantum cryptology. But this promptly disappears, making it not so much a Chekhovian gun as a Checkhovian RPG. But perhaps it will reappear in Book 3. (Book 2 is set in Europe, but hopefully will manage not to reprise Garfield 2.)

Is Salem’s Cipher worth reading? To me, it feels like a slightly awkward cross-over, a chick lit feminists-save-the-world spin on the clunky mainstream crumb-trail cipher mystery Americana chase thriller genre: and if that description doesn’t put you off, you should probably get yourself a copy ASAP. 🙂

A few years back, Bill Walsh sent me a (fairly early, as I recall) draft of his vaguely-Voynich-Manuscript-themed novel to have a look at. And now that a proper copy has finally landed on my doorstep, all finished and shiny, the inevitable question arises…

Is it any good?

Tales From The Black Chamber: A Supernatural Thriller

First things first: anyone who fills their bookshelves solely with High Literature can look away now. “Tales From The Black Chamber” was written more as an amuse-bouche, to the point that many of the book’s protagonists were simply light-hearted pastiches of Bill’s friends at the time. He even mentions me (p.110) as an interesting Voynich theorist (but don’t hold that against him, it’s mercifully brief).

His story races past all manner of things cryptographic and demonological, with a sassy female bibliophile main character who gets swept up (mostly unwillingly) in a world-spanning story that’s far more fin du monde than fan-fic. Even though knowing a bit about Richard Kieckhefer and the history of magic circles beforehand might help the reader a little, such research fare is certainly far from essential here. Oddly enough, I didn’t remember the story’s ending at all from when I read it the first time round (perhaps it changed along the way?), but it did wrap everything up quite satisfyingly.

So… what are the scores, George Dawes? Well, my arithmetic goes like this: Tales From The Black Chamber gets four stars, basically for being pacy, genuinely readable, not outstaying its welcome, and having characters you don’t actually want to punch after half a page. The extra half a star I’d really like to give it for The Best Gratuitous Inclusion Of A Mongolian Shaman gets cancelled out by The Worst Job Offer (And Least Plausible Job Acceptance) In History Ever Ever (Ever), along with the main characters’ hyperactive overuse of weaponry (despite the fact that this has become completely par for the course in a primarily American genre, arguably).

Even though Bill seems never to have expected it to turn out so well, I think he’s ended up doing a damn fine job: and anyone who secretly enjoys the warm buzz of reading about necromancy and the supernatural that always seems to be a mere half-step away from the Voynichian research mainstream will probably enjoy his book. Good luck, Bill, I hope it does well! 🙂

PS: doubtless some people (OK, mainly Americans) will actually rather enjoy all that gun fetishry, but it’s a big Internet out there, with plenty of space to write your own reviews if such a thing wouldst pleaseth thee greatly. If so, then go ahead, knocketh thyself out. 🙂

Too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel, some might say that The Voynich Affair by Linnet Moss suffers from both problematic elongation and improper positioning.

But given that Google (until today) yielded precisely zero hits for the phrase “Voynich erotica”, Moss is clearly reaming out a niche untouched by few (if any) previous hands.

Voynich Erotica

But has she hit the spot?

I must confess that I found reading “The Voynich Affair” on a Kindle on the bus towards Staines in the morning rush hour more than a bit unsettling. Coming to the genre for the first time (so to speak), what I found oddest was that it seems to be written by people scared to death of physical intimacy, and aimed at readers who are also scared to death of physical intimacy. No, really.

I don’t know, it’s like it was typed by someone wearing gloves: chic, distantly-perfumed Italian leather gloves, sure, but gloves nonetheless. And for all the shudderingly implausible physical encounters described in the text, the whole endeavour came across as being locked within a resolutely lonely world, sans any flicker of Sartrean authenticity.

As a result, I can’t claim to have liked (or even mildly empathised with) any of the protagonists: but given that there are plenty of Internationally Acclaimed Bestsellers which failed that same test even more dramatically (Digital Fortress, anyone? *sigh*), that hardly amounts to a serious criticism. And anyway, that’s probably not the point of erotica, right?

At this point, a traditional review would tell you about how the story is based around extra missing pages of the manuscript in a French chateau, and involves various broodingly mysterious (and sociopathic) Voynich researchers: but frankly that’s a bit pointless. By now, you’ve almost certainly decided whether or not you’re interested, so all I can usefully add is that all fifteen chapters are freely available online, starting here.

The Selfish Reason

At this point, I have to ‘fess up to the real reason I bought a copy of The Voynich Affair (which Linnet Moss published as part of “The Mind-Body Problem: Stories of Desire and Love in Academe” (2012), complete with Voynich page on the (virtual) front cover)…

mind-body-problem

…which is that I wanted to see if the various Voynich researchers in the story were loosely based on any real-world Voynich researchers.

OK, OK: I wanted to see if I had been parodied. Not that I can’t take a joke, it’s just that I’d rather know about the joke than find out about it a decade later. 🙂

Happily, though, I can exclusively reveal that no Voynich researcher seems to have been openly parodied (no Randy Zenbergen, no Donna Via-Odeon, and no sign of the infamous Len Pickling), nor were any Voynichians’ sexual proclivities (errrm, to the best of my knowledge) turned into sort-of-page-turning Voynich-themed erotic encounters.

Unless you know better, that is? 😉

But… Who Would Write Such A Thing?

Author Linnet Moss claims to be:

“a college professor who writes fiction in her spare time. She adores old books, new books, cats, frogs, miniature books, wine, Trappist ales, tea from Ceylon, vegetarian gourmet food, London, Rome, Art Deco skyscrapers, and beautiful men.”

Of course, while some (or indeed all) of this may be true, it remains just as possible that Moss is a short balding non-professor bloke from Deptford with OCD, conceptually not too far removed from “paradee man woman” Wor Cheryl, pet.

As a result, I can (just about) see how some readers might possibly see decrypting the author’s identity, age, and/or indeed gender from the text as a worthwhile challenge.

For me, though, I’m sticking with the Voynich Manuscript: that has more than enough strangely inscrutable nymphs to worry about for one lifetime. 😉

I’ve read a lot – and I really do mean a lot – of Voynich Manuscript-themed (and other genuine-historical-cipher-themed) novels over the years, and I have to say that the whole experience rarely gets any better than just-about-OK-if-there’s-nothing-much-on-TV. Yes, even with TV in the nadir-like pit it has winched itself down into these days.

Sad as it is, such novelists’ including-an-ancient-unbroken-cipher writing mechanism comes across to reflective readers as rather, I don’t know, desperate-and-wanting-to-be-loved (and doubtless someone will tell me an obscure German or Icelandic adjective to describe this more precisely). More precisely, it shouts out “please God, let importing some genuine real-world mystery be enough to distract attention from the countless plot flaws, the unconvincing characters, and the piss-poor writing“. And that’s before you’ve even got to page one.

At the same time, none of the above ever hurt Dan Brown, so why not press that button and see where it leads, eh?

the-voynich-deception

Indeed, Michael Lancashire pressed that very button: and to his credit, his novel “The Voynich Deception” comes out of it basically an OK read. As the backdrop to his story, he has an unfeasibly clever guy (‘The Architect’) devising unfeasibly-clever-yet-still-oddly-micromanaged evil plans for ambitious crims to buy to execute. The rest of the plot involves a group of brutal, greedy and unlovable – though utterly uninvolving – Albanian gangsters following a blood-soaked trail of Voynich-linked cookie crumbs ever onwards towards a long-concealed treasure trove, where… well, that last bit would be telling, so my lips are sealed.

But at the same time, what I can say is that the structural weakness of “The Voynich Deception” is that while Lancashire’s ‘Architect’ is just an anti-Sherlock Holmesian conceit, the entire story pivots entirely on a single (admittedly fairly large) twist, one which the author flags very early on. As such, it’s more like a long short story than a novel: and for all the (occasional spatter of) blood ‘n’ gore, it does end up feeling a bit… thin.

Still, Lancashire is respectful towards the Voynich Manuscript (which is good), and he tells his story at a fair old pace, something far too many cipher novelists struggle with (hint: a fight they usually lose ignominiously).

The Kindle ebook version is only £1.99, so it’s not a huge investment or risk. And if you like The Voynich Deception, Lancashire has since written an Architect prequel novella (“Kernel Panic”) for you to move onto. All in all: not my tasse de thé, sure, but a perfectly OK read.

Having been exposed to what might reasonably be termed a ‘surfeit’ of unhealthily imaginative Voynich theories since nineteen-clickety-duck [*], I’d like to think that I’ve seen quite a lot of ‘highly unlikely scenarios’: and so pretty much anything involving Roger Bacon, time travel, and the Voynich Manuscript I should have covered, right?

Wrong! In her 2013 novel “A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide To Saving The World” Rachel Cantor straps an extra ten feet to her conceptual pole and vaults far higher than just about anyone else would try. (In fact, I’d say she tries her level best to vault out of the whole darn arena.)

Yet there’s a spark, verve and swerve to her jambalaya of story ingredients: future fast food corporations at war, a heady mix of mismatched philosophies, time-travelling conversations (with Marco Polo and family members), magical songs (“who is the king of the [clap] third ether?“, stop me if you’ve heard it before), anarchist book club members (sort of), and clothes so vividly jangling they make your inner eye hurt (toreador pants and red afros? Yes, really). And then the story properly begins…

There will be those who glibly snark that such a book is not a ‘novel’, it is simply a creative writing experiment that somehow managed to escape the labs: and that the correct cultural response to such over-hybridized monsters is a tranquilizer dart in the thigh and a discreetly dark van to clear the Frankenbody from the streets. But pshaw to such reactionary knee-jerking, I say: for all its angularity, such writing keeps language fresh and (dare I say it) exciting. Read this and enjoy it! 🙂

[*] Which is, of course, the punch-line to the wonderful old joke: “Two little old ladies playing bingo. One says to the other, ‘You know, I’ve been coming here since nineteen clickety-duck’.

Leena Krohn’s novel “Datura” has long been on my big fat list of Voynich novels: though originally released in 2001 as ‘Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee’ by the multi-genre Finnish writer, it has now been translated into English as Datura, or a delusion we all see.

The story follows a woman running a kind of Finnish Fortean Times, and its chapters are criss-crossed by her (fictional) encounters with oddbods holding a wide range of fringe beliefs about reality. All the while, her accidental addiction to Datura is growing, while her ability to tell fantasy from reality diminishes… it’s a slippery slope. The Voynich Manuscript is in there somewhere (but then again, so is a lot of other marginal stuff).

That’s the bare bones of the story – is it worth a read?

Unfortunately, I didn’t really enjoy it half as much as I hoped I would. Krohn launches her story from a traditional horror plotline trope (the a-little-bit-of-this-surely-won’t-hurt gag), but never really puts her foot on the accelerator: her main character’s meetings with Fortean outsiders are more tetchy and impatient than genuinely weird or mind-expanding, and only occasionally intersect with anything like the plot.

Even the book’s Fortean fare – the Voynich Manuscript included – acts merely as a backdrop to the main character’s solipsistic, dreary suburban life, in thrall to her friend Markus (who owns the magazine she edits) for no particularly good reason. Even the ridiculous practical risks involved with taking Datura – aka the moonflower, angel’s trumpets, Devil’s Weed, or Jinson weed – are breezed over.

I’m sorry to say that at the end of the book I came away wishing that Krohn had been braver, had taken more risks with the writing, had been… I don’t know, altogether more gothic.

Structurally, you can’t (I’d say with my editor hat on) genuinely hope to sustain a book around a main character whose interactions with other characters are avowedly indifferent or grudgingly accepting: it’s just not enough for readers to work with.

I’ve got a lot of time for Dominic Selwood: his 1999 (non-fiction) book Knights of the Cloister: Templars and Hospitallers in Central-Southern Occitania, c.1100-c.1300 painted a detailed, evidence-based picture of the Knights Templars across a properly historical and social background. It is not, as he points out, “light relaxing reading”: but remains a fine counterpoint to the more militaristic / political / conspiratorial accounts of the two Orders, well worth looking at.

Just so you know: back in 2001, I went to a lecture of his at the (now long-slumbering) Canonbury Masonic Research Institute, and later asked him by email about Templar artificial alphabets that were used for signing their proto-‘cheques’. Unfortunately, he replied that “All my notes from my research were thrown away by accident by the staff where I used to work“, (though he may still have some images on slides).

At that time, he had just completed a PhD at Oxford (and occasionally played in a band called The Binmen!) and was then starting the work as a barrister that would occupy him for the next five years: and so I was intrigued to discover a few weeks ago that he had just published a novel called The Sword of Moses (the Kindle version is currently only 62p, which is a steal).

the-sword-of-moses-cover

Oddly, this also seems to have necessitated drinking some Johnny Depp-stylee potion, as can be seen from the dramatic physical transformation he has undergone:-

Dominic-Selwood-as-was

Dominic-Selwood-as-is-or-perhaps-his-evil-twin

Either that or the novel was written by his evil twin, it’s hard to tell. 😉

Anyway, if you even remotely know how books in the historical-artefact/modern-threat/sassy-hero genre run, you’ll be at home immediately (think Ark of the Covenant, international mercenaries, bombs, assault weapons, etc): and the main character (Dr Ava Curzon) is a kind of passive-aggressive ‘Jane Bond’ / Lara Croft ex-spook-now-sassy-archaeologist hybrid, probably with half an eye towards Angelina Jolie in the film version (as per normal). And if you can find a genuinely empathetic or believable character anywhere in the mix, you’re far more observant than I am: but that’s hardly much of a criticism, as it is industry standard fare for the genre.

The most obviously notable feature, though, is the sheer scale of the book. Not just the chunky page count (792 pages!), but it is very much as though Selwood has collided two or three already biggish novels together, and welded the wreckage together into a fatter, lumpier composite: Ethiopian churches, Iraq, Knights Templar (who, it seems, are still going strong, bless ’em), Masons, MI6, Russian gangsters, Israeli spies, London/Kent Neo-Nazis, necromancy, John Dee, etc all play their respective part (though the Voynich Manuscript only gets a cameo, it has to be said): and even dear old Aleister Crowley gets more than a nod.

Really, this all comes across to me as though Selwood’s Writing Ambition was in a gladiatorial fight to the death against Editorial Control, where only the former was wielding a sword. By which I mean that even though he writes pretty well, whenever his story’s fire starts to flicker a little, he anxiously hurls yet more geopolitics and history onto its flames: but that rich burning smell ultimately comes across as one of insecurity, not of confidence.

For me, though, the most interesting feature of “The Sword of Moses” was the history – the book clearly sits atop the heaped spoils of Selwood’s lifetime’s connoisseurship of alt.history strands. And what I think transforms the whole enterprise into something epic is something that I think emerges from the text only indirectly: his personal micro-crusade against junk history.

Honestly, he seems to be saying, why do novelists invest so much time filling their genre books with historical nonsense, when the real deal is even more excruciatingly complex and intriguing, if you just bother to get your stupid superficial noses out of Wikipedia? And so he goes out of his way to get the history properly right, again and again: mightily impressive, densely entertaining, heavily intertextual stuff.

And so when it comes to the idea that forms the historical backbone of his novel, it’s his idea of a proper shocker: that the Old Testament has polytheism and even ritual sacrifice embedded in it (which is indeed entirely true). But… but… but… this is also where it all goes a bit Pete Tong.

The horrible, dull truth is that exposing the ritualistic layers codicologically embedded in plain sight within The Bible (and having a super-evil necromancer to bring them to some kind of twisted life) just isn’t much of a surprise any more. The Dan Brown sincere flattery crowd (as in “imitation is…”) of novelists have kind of strip-mined the genre: and for all their dodgy historical faults, in the list of their crimes against readers Bad History comes a distant third behind Empty Characterization and Mile-Wide Plot Faults.

So… while I like Dominic and have terrific admiration for his historical sensibilities and indeed writing ambition, I finished his book feeling that he set out on his novel-writing quest to solve the wrong problem. Having myself read far too many books in this genre over recent years than is properly healthy, I’d agree that he really isn’t tilting at windmills – that Bad History is an endemic problem in fiction in general. But he’ll have to work somewhat harder with his next novel to help readers care whether Dr Ava Curzon lives or dies, because frankly I never quite managed that piece of reading magic, sorry. 🙁

Jeremy Robinson’s and Sean Ellis’s latest Jack Sigler novel “Prime” (2013) reveals the origins of the “Chess Team” (their super-secret Delta-of-Deltas best-of-the-best elite US army team, that’s hopefully fictional, or else I’m a dead man in the next 10 minutes 🙂) that rattles along in the other novels in the same series. Here, though, the goodies-vs-superbaddies story plays out against the backdrop of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets, the origins of the Black Plague, and indeed the ultimate origins of Life on Earth. But with lots of guns.

Thankfully, Robinson gets one over on most of his Voynich fiction competition by finding ways of not inserting too many cut-and-pasted slabs of cod Wikipedia-esque history into his brisk narrative: while another near-first is that the manuscript stays centre-stage throughout the whole book, which is also a nice change from what has become the norm.

Yet… despite all the knowingly-contemporary ironic macho posturing and ultra-weaponry fetishism of the genre, the language of “Prime” used still feels to me like it has been written for 17- or 18-year-olds. You know: relentlessly soul-less super-soldier hyper-gun pr0n, coupled with the run-at-the-camera poisoned-sugar rush of 3d zombie films and the moral one-dimensionality of young adult fiction. And as for the crypto girl’s inner maths-geek monologues… well, best not get me started on something that badly lame.

“Prime” was certainly a quick read, and perhaps if I had previously trawled through the rest of the Chess Team series, I might just have viewed many of the sequences in a different, possibly more nuanced light. But in the end, I’m pretty sure that it is what it is: a Voynich novel that treats the manuscript with reasonable respect (mostly), yet fetishizes and objectifies just about everything else it touches. And with lots of guns.

Basically, if your secret inner you is an 18-year-old kid who thinks that big guns and heroes that are described as looking like “Hugh Jackman[‘s]… film portrayal of the comic book superhero Wolverine” (p.26) are all like totally kewl, while also being a tiny bit of a cipher mystery history geek, then maybe this is the hot book of the year for you. But for the rest of us… maybe not.

While accidentally reading John Grisham’s “Theodore Boone” the other day, what struck me the most was the sheer laziness of the characterization. In particular, Boone’s uncle came across to me a paint-by-numbers Donald Sutherland part – the whole failed-lawyer-looking-for-redemption-through-a-younger-man’s-action thing, if you remember Time To Kill. Kind of set my teeth on edge right from near the start: not good, not good at all.

Similarly, the moment that the female lead in Russell Blake’s The Voynich Cypher appears wearing a “skin-tight black jumpsuit crafted from suede that left little to the imagination and calf-height black leather boots boasting four-inch heels” was the precise moment that the author left me behind. It’s not exaggerated, it’s not comic, it’s just lame, big-stylee. It’s not even Angelina Jolie (who would be too tall for the part).

Don’t get me wrong, I like independent writing and independent publishing: but there’s only so heavy a storm of genre clichés I can weather before I just want to shut the door on the lot of them. And on those terms, this was a perfect storm.

Yet even though other writers seem hugely comfortable with The Good Conspiracy Vs The Bad Conspiracy plot structure virtually all such modern cipher thrillers seem to roll out, here it’s handled without much finesse. In fact, if I were to say that it came across to me as a kind of Poundland remake of The Da Vinci Code with the Voynich Manuscript spliced in awkwardly, rest assured that that wouldn’t be giving away the plot.

As far as the writing goes, only one line stands out in the whole book (a bakery-related semi-gag on p.230, *sigh*), which quickly turns out to be no more than a clumsy artifice for introducing the young-sexy-woman-gets-it-on-with-the-older-man-despite-their-daunting-age-gap cliché. How many times have I read that? More to the point, how many more times will I have to endure it?

Sure, you might possibly like The Voynich Cypher, it’s certainly a quick’n’easy read… but personally, I just didn’t get it. Then again, I thought Fifty Shades of Whatever was, ummm, pants, so what do I know? 🙂

A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn’t a ‘crowd’, but (rather delightfully) a ‘murder‘ of crows.

What, I wonder then, would be the right collective term for a set of Voynich novels? Though I’ve settled for “an obfuscation” here, doubtless you’ll have your own ideas. 🙂

Anyway, here are five relatively new Voynich novels I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a short while…

* (2011) The Cadence of Gypsies – Barbara Casey

“On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written in an unknown language left to her by her birth mother. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.”

* (2012) The Book of Blood & Shadow – Robin Wasserman

“Desperate to prove [her boyfriend Max’s] innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine…”

* (2012) Vaults of Power – Diane Echer

“When her twin is kidnapped in Southern France, Robyn Gabriel has six days to steal the precious Voynich manuscript from a bunker-like library at Yale University and break its code– […] The Federal Reserve can’t allow that. Now, they want her dead.”

* (2011) In a Celandine World – Catherine Thorpe

“The truth is going to come out. A truth that has long been forgotten. A truth that was concealed in a manuscript in the 12th century. An impossible truth. A dangerous truth that will blow Willow’s secret wide open—leaving her scrambling to save the only man she could ever love.”

* (2012?) The Voynich Cypher – Russell Blake [announced but not yet released]

“When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptologist living in Tuscany, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history’s most enigmatic documents…”

I already have the first two to read & review, though I must confess I’m finding it difficult to get into the Cadence of Gypsies, possibly because it’s aimed at a Teen / Young Adult audience. Oh well – I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck! 🙂

Incidentally, I just noticed that the ebook version of In a Celandine World is free at SmashWords until February 15th 2012, so if you’d like to be entertained by Catherine Thorpe’s Victorian Knot-garden-inspired time-shifting paranormal Voynich romance, feel just as free to click on the link! 🙂