Q

A sprawling cowl-and-dagger novel-by-committee, recounting a game of theological spy vs. spy.

Luther Blissett is a learned-allusion pseudonym for four unnamed Italian writers; the publisher tells us only that they are young, and that Q is a “cult bestseller” in Europe. The book has its pleasures, one of which makes for the same kind of fun that Harold Bloom had in distinguishing the authors of the Book of Genesis—namely, identifying the voices of those four young scribes. One of them, it seems safe to say, is quite fond of the earthier matters in life: “He farts, sniggers, swigs. ‘Fuck it!’ ” His/hers is the voice of a mysterious Anabaptist heretic who, inspired by Martin Luther and kindred spirits, travels across Germany stirring up religious dissent, railing against corrupt priests and wayward aristocrats. Against this agent of the Reformation stands the equally mysterious Q, an agent of the papacy, who adds a somewhat more refined if equally strident voice to the mix. Q has a flair for E. Howard Hunt/G. Gordon Liddy–style dirty tricks: for instance, his notion of planting a Luther-style agent provocateur, “more diabolical than the devil’s friar, someone who would eclipse his fame and give voice to the desires of the mob” in order to frighten the German ruling class into inviting the pope’s armies up north for some good old-fashioned bloodletting. Heretic and Q chase each other across Europe for several hundred pages and a quarter of a century, developing a grudging respect for each other along the way. Set Les Miserables in Reformation Europe, with Javert reporting to an evil cardinal instead of the prefect of police, and you’ll have something of this book. Or imagine a Name of the Rose–like historical thriller coauthored by, say, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith: “Watch your arse among the Mohammedans and careful where you stick your cock!”

A modest entertainment, holding hours of fun in ferreting out anachronisms once the voices-sorting-out is through. But surely one of the best multiauthor novels of the Reformation to appear in recent times.