The Righteous Men
by Sam Bourne (2006)
Will Monroe is a half-English, half-American journalist,
raised mostly by his mother in England after his parents split up. After
studying at Oxford, he goes to the land of his father (a judge) to be a
post-grad at Columbia and then work for the New
York Times. A reporting assignment on a seemingly routine murder in a dodgy
part of Manhattan takes on a new angle when someone has something good to say
about the victim, a pimp who on one occasion pawned most of his possessions in
order to give money to a woman who would otherwise have become a prostitute.
For his next assignment, Will’s off to the Pacific Northwest to report on some flooding
although he ends up reporting on another murder – this time a survivalist
nutter in Montana who, it turns out, had previously donated one of his kidneys
anonymously. Although they were rather unsavoury characters, both victims had
performed selfless acts of generosity that led them to be described as
‘righteous’. Then Will’s wife gets abducted. This leads him into the world of the
insular Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he’s
introduced to an old Jewish legend about the well-being of the world being held
up by thirty-six ‘righteous’ men who can exist anywhere in the world, and who
often try to shield their inherent good nature; when one dies, a new one is
born and so there are always thirty-six men making sure that the rest of us are
OK. Trouble is, someone’s figured out who they are and is trying to murder them
all between the Jewish holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in order to
bring about the end of the world. This is the premise at the heart of The Righteous Men, a sub-Da Vinci Code thriller by Jonathan Freedland,
a Guardian journalist writing under
the somewhat Dan Brown-esque pseudonym of Sam Bourne. Will is aided by two
friends, a computer geek and an ex-girlfriend called TC who he initially goes
to because he needs to understand more about Judaism and she’s the only Jewish
person he knows, but it just so happens that she was raised in Crown Heights
before leaving that life behind to become a highly intelligent if slightly kooky
artist (here I started to feel that the old Buchan rule about ‘shockers’ marching just within the bounds of the possible was being not so
much stretched to the limit as broken). Amid a rising body-count, Will and TC
try to figure out what’s going on via a series of cryptic text-messages sent by
a person unknown (they think it’s someone Will met from within the Hasidic
community, but after he gets killed the messages keep coming so it must be
someone else). When the twists eventually come, they’re rather predicable but
by this point I was over half-way through so I felt I had to carry on to the
end – this is the sort of novel in which you just know that the people who Will
initially thinks are behind the murders can’t possibly be the actual people
responsible, and the climactic reveal of the Leigh Teabing figure who’s the
evil genius behind it all doesn’t really come as much of a surprise, to be
honest. Perhaps ‘generic’ is the word I’m looking for here, and at well over
500 pages it’s a tad over-long too. Would I be interested in anything else that
this author has to offer? Probably not.
Shattered Icon
by Bill Napier (2003)
Harry Blake is an antiquarian book-seller in Lincoln whose
usual dull routine is interrupted by Sir Toby Tebbit, a minor aristocrat with
whom he’s had dealings in the past, coming to him with an old manuscript that
he’s inherited from a distant relative in Jamaica of whose existence he’d been
unaware. As to the content of the manuscript, it’s been written in some sort of
code. Unfortunately, some bad people are after said manuscript and will stop at
nothing to get hold of it – before long, Sir Toby is dead (not by natural
causes) and Harry becomes a fugitive as he tries to decode the manuscript with
the help of Zola, an old friend of his (and an
expert in maritime history, no less). As it gradually gets decoded, the
manuscript becomes the story-within-the-story, relating to the adventures of a low-born
but well-educated Scotsman called James Ogilvie who went to London and ended up
as a sailor on the ill-fated Roanaoke expedition – a real-life unsuccessful
early attempt to establish an English colony in what’s now North Carolina
during the reign of Elizabeth I. It turns out, though, that there was an ulterior motive behind establishing said colony – all to do with a new
calendar devised by the mathematician/astrologer/alchemist John Dee (an
alternative to the Gregorian one; Dee, an advisor to Elizabeth I, really did
come up with a Protestant alternative calendar although it was never
implemented) which somehow required someone to be at the 77 degrees west line
of longitude even though no-one knew how to figure out longitude back then. Into this mix is added a secret plot by England’s Catholics to wreck the whole thing, this
act coinciding (they hope) with a successful outcome of the plot to put Mary
Queen of Scots on the English throne. An ancient religious icon (a piece of
wood that everyone believes to be a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified) is at the heart of the mystery. Back in the present day, Harry and Zola are
joined by Sir Toby’s daughter Debbie on a trip to Jamaica which becomes a race
to find the icon before the afore-mentioned bad people – a group of decidedly
nutty but seriously violent religious fanatics who are plotting an all-out
religious war – can get their hands on it. At times, the plot twists are a tad
eccentric, but they stretch rather than break the Buchan rule in the way that thrillers do these
days thanks to Dan Brown even if this book, while being quite fun to read,
wasn’t quite up to that standard. I did wonder if Napier had originally
intended this to be an Elizabethan adventure, only for him to turn this into a
story within a modern-day framework narrative, what with the prospect of
religious war being a topical theme in the post-9/11 world and a modern plot
concerning an ancient religious legend or (in this case) item being topical too
in the early-to-mid-2000s thanks to The Da Vinci
Code (which was published in the same year as Shattered Icon which, by the way, was published as Splintered Icon in the USA which makes more sense given what said icon is). But hey, it had me glued to the point where I was
reading it into the wee small hours which is always a good sign where novels
are concerned (assuming, of course, that I was genuinely interested and not
just unable to sleep, not that I was really in a position to make a judgement
call on that as it was too late, or rather too early, at the time). I was,
though, amused to discover a discrete reference to Buchan himself amid
the excitement – James, our Scottish Elizabethan sailor, hails from a Lowland
village called Tweedsmuir, which was the title Buchan took when he was elevated
to the peerage.
The Fifth Gospel
by Ian Caldwell (2016)
I’d not previously heard of Ian Caldwell, and to be
honest I only really picked up this book because it wasn’t long after I’d
finished Conclave by Robert Harris
(which I enjoyed right up to the last plot-twist, which I felt took things a
step too far than they perhaps should have gone, violating the Buchan rule but not as much as Sam Bourne did) and
quite fancied another Vatican-based thriller. This one doesn’t involve a papal
conclave but I was intrigued by the information provided by the blurb on the
back which stated that the protagonist is a Greek Catholic (Eastern liturgy but
part of the worldwide Catholic church) priest who lives in the Vatican; that genuinely
intrigued me. So – The Fifth Gospel. It
is 2004. A mysterious exhibit is being planned in the Vatican Museum, but with a week
to go before it opens the exhibit’s curator gets murdered at Castel Gandolfo,
the Pope’s summer residence outside Rome. At the same time, the Vatican apartment
of the victim’s one-time research partner is broken into. Said one-time
research partner is our protagonist (and also narrator), Father Alex Angelou,
who takes it upon himself to investigate who’s behind the murder and the
break-in; also, his brother, who was largely responsible for his upbringing,
has vanished and he reckons (correctly) that this is not coincidental. The brother, Simon,
is also a priest – albeit a Roman Catholic, not a Greek Catholic, one (their
family is of a mixed religious heritage; their father was a Greek Catholic
priest, while on their mother’s side Uncle Lucio is a Roman Catholic cardinal).
Thus are two brothers shown as a microcosm of the split in Christendom between
Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that forms the backdrop of this novel
which also takes in the titular fifth gospel – a work known as the Diatessaron
which combines elements of the four gospels and which the curator had been studying
in some depth – and its links to a certain controversial holy relic. Father
Alex’s quest for the truth takes him to all corners of the Vatican, including
one memorable scene in the underground car park where he has to hide in the Popemobile!
Admittedly that part sounds a bit ludicrous, but believe me Caldwell pulls off
the trick of making it sound just about plausible or, if you prefer, within the bounds of the possible. This is compelling stuff,
with Caldwell not just providing us with a highly believable murder mystery
which is also religious thriller which has an interesting protagonist (Father
Alex), in addition to which there’s a vivid picture of the insular world of the
Vatican at the time when John Paul II’s papacy was drawing to a close (the
ailing Pope himself is an unseen character until very late on, which works
well). Even the persistent use of the present tense, which I sometimes find
annoying, seems to work well here, and it definitely passed the reading-into-the-small-hours
test. Out of the three books I’m looking at here, this is the one I would
recommend the most, by some considerable distance.
