ENDPAPER
Of books inside books
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Has any other literary genre captured the drama of bookishness better than bookish thrillers?
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After literary mysteries, bookish thrillers are my favourite entertainment. They capture the drama of bookish obsession with such close attention to the atmospherics of books — their physical presence, the craft of making them, the art of colle
cting them. Books are the actual protagonists in these thrillers. Not books about books but books inside books. In this genre, librarians, bookstore clerks, collectors and even readers (you and I) come off looking brilliant and sexy! Bookish thrillers keep the inner bibliophile in all of us happy.
Rich for the genre
This year has been particularly rich for the genre: Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows is the hunt for an unknown Shakespeare manuscript; the heroine of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale is an antiquarian bookseller who uncovers, in De Maurier’s Rebecca-style, secrets buried in a private library in this Bronte-ish tale of literary family secrets; Edgar Allan Poe himself investigates a series of gruesome Poe-lik
e murders in Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye, Mathew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow is an obsessive search for the real-life model for Poe’s genius-sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin; Freud and Jung assist in psycho
analysing a murderer in Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder and Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things is about the discovery of a hand-written version of Herman Melville’s lost Isle of the Cross (a novel that in fact existed but disappeared after Melville’s publisher rejected it).
Bookish thrillers have always been around but they have never been as ambitious or as daringly bookish as the ones described above. Their sudden (and even bestselling) prominence is due to one recent bookish book that galvanised and expanded the boundaries of the genre: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind. Its young bibliophile hero tells us that he “was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my
hands to this day”. He is referring, of course, to the centrepiece of the story: a gigantic, hidden labyrinthine library called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books that he is privileged to enter and explore.
What Zafon’s book did for the genre was to offer a learned, challenging thriller that did not condescend to the reader.
Superior entertainment
The Book of Air and Shadows is superior literary entertainment. To say it concerns the hunt for a lost manuscript is to say almost nothing about this erudite, witty book about secret codes, femme fatales, car chases and movie reference
s — and all of it narrated in a stylish, nimble prose. An assortment of compelling and intriguing characters are drawn into a quest to find the hiding place of a previously unknown, undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript. In the Bard’s own handwriting. There are currently only six samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting — and only on legal documents. Naturally there are many — scholars, collectors and criminals —willing to kill for it.
The most elegantly crafted bookish thriller after this is The Pale Blue Eye. It is 1830, and a retired detective takes the help of Edgar Allan Poe (then a young military cadet at West Point) to solve a series of grisly mutilations &
#8212;possibly the handy work of a satanic cult. The book triumphs on many levels: in a believable, exciting fictionalisation of Poe, a cunning, atmospheric plot filled with enigmatic clues and, above all, mesmerising gothic details and period prose.
Poe also happens to be the subject of The Poe Shadow, the new literary mystery by Mathew Pearl, the author of The Dante Club. Pearl’s latest is an exciting, erudite excursion into the last days of Poe to sol
ve the mystery of the writer’s death. A young lawyer becomes obsessed with Poe and journeys to France to meet the real detective (on whom Poe modelled Dupin, his legendary sleuth) in the hope of solving the enigma of the writer’s death.
I won’t hint at the plot of The Thirteenth Tale, lest I give away its secrets but I would like to say something about how the book feels (or reads) to a long-standing reader. Like the books we curled up with in school and coll
ege — like the gothic mysteries such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca that gripped our imagination; tales of romance, fantasy, suspense and forbidden secrets. Except here the author, Diane Setterfield, an English acade
mic, updates the fantasy for a 21st century reader by combing these classic elements with contemporary characters and preoccupations.
My personal favourite in this lot is Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things. Apart from its very literary plot (the possible discovery of an unpublished Herman Melville manuscript and how it affects those brokering a deal to
publish it) it has the most indulgent setting and characters for a bookish thriller: a legendary bookshop, its difficult-to-please proprietor and his book-smitten employees. The cavernous bookshop (called The Arcade) seems to be modelled after Strand, the famous discount/used bookstore in Manhattan — or one assumes this because the author herself once worked there.
Bookish thrillers — has any other literary genre captured the drama of bookishness better?
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