A modest entertainment, holding hours of fun in ferreting out anachronisms once the voices-sorting-out is through. But...
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.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101063-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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