Death in Spain, Murder and Race Relations in Boston and Philly- Part 3

The Flanders Panel (TFP) by Arturo Perez-Reverte was written by one of my favorite authors. I have read about 80% of his novels that have been translated into English. The writing is always outstanding. Unlike with many authors, these novels span genres, styles and subject matter, and have settings that are modern or historical, or both.

Chess plays a big role in TFP. Earlier this autumn I read and discussed Katherine Neville's cult classic, The Eight, in which the game of chess is also central to the story. TFP isn't a stuffy book by any means, however. We experience a world of Madrid's beauty, love and betrayal in distant the past and present, modern dance clubs and vices, art galleries, collectors and dealers, threatening businessmen, fast-living bums and studious academics. Oh, and plenty of murders that don't seem to make sense.

In TFP, first we meet Julia, a beautiful art restorer who is working on The Game of Chess, a painting from by the Flemish master Van Huys that needs some work before it can be auctioned. Julia has just received a set of X-ray photographs of the painting, and they reveal a surprising and startling secret. Underneath layers of paint, yet dating to the time of the original painting, is a Latin inscription visible only via the X-ray results:

Quis Necavit Equitem

The translation she immediately carries out yields "Who killed the knight?" It turns out that other slightly different translations are also possible, and perhaps valid.

Although "The Game of Chess" had been known for 500 years, and even hung in the Prado during the early part of the 20th century, the discovery of a hidden inscription has the chance to increase the painting's value greatly at auction, so the wolves start circling immediately. An auction is planned shortly in order to raise money for the once-patrician, and currently dysfunctional, family that owns the piece of art and history.

I like the idea of a place, Spain is this case, where a stunningly beautiful woman devotes herself to restoring and researching art and who has the background to read Latin with aplomb and write brilliant summaries and analyses of the provenance and authenticity of classical paintings. In such a place, I could perhaps live happily, maybe with a job as museum guard. Even though this seems like one idiot's version of paradise, the idiot being me, Julia is in for an extended patch of stormy weather. However, she may turn out to be one of the lucky inhabitants of this intriguing place where new and old worlds collide.

One of the pleasures of this book is the chess puzzles, the first of which is the puzzle left by the painter on the the canvas, one that does not require X-rays to be revealed. The painting shows a chess game between two men, a nobleman and a soldier, being played while a woman sits in the background reading a book. The whole scene is reflected in a mirror, and the floor tiles of the room represent the pattern of a chessboard. The actual chessboard used for the game is placed between the two male subjects, who are rendered precisely, as are all of the details of the room. The artist painted in an intricate style, and even the room's reflection in the mirror can be seen. The chess pieces and their placement on the board are clear, and the game has progressed quite far, though not very conventionally.

The first part of the puzzle is to work the painting's game in reverse and determine which piece took the white knight. Why? Because the painter seems to have constructed the entire painting to be a set of clues to a centuries-old murder. Julia solves this puzzle and its sad secrets with help from friends- an old family friend and a new recruit from a local chess club. The chess puzzles in the book are enhanced by pictures of chess boards, so you can try to work out the next (or previous) moves on your own.

However, while further researching the painting and its refractory inscription, odd events begin to occur around Julia, and several of her friends are murdered. It seems that she and her friends have to solve a new chess puzzle based on the game in the painting. The new puzzle is being set for them by some sort of deranged chess master, and it seems to encompass the lives and deaths of the painting's subjects and of Julia et al. The killer starts playing the painting's game forwards, and the taking of pieces corresponds to more murders. Anticipating the next move becomes a matter of life and death.

Will Julia survive? Is she the White Queen? Which of her friends are represented by the other pieces on the board? Which themes from Greek tragedy will play a prominent role? Perhaps the day be will be saved by Julia and an unlikely hero, an introverted chess master who never wins a game, but settles for showing his opponent that he could win if wanted to. At least this one time, settling for a moral victory could prove fatal. With all the confusion, possible betrayals, accelerating pace, and substantial odds against Julia's coterie, perhaps the game will will be lost. Read The Flanders Panel to find out.

Note added afterwards: I forgot to mention that I especially enjoyed reading that Julia listens to the music of Michael Edges! Mr. Hedges was never edgier.

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No crime at all. Review of "To The Hermitage" by Malcolm Bradbury and The Eight by Katherine Neville

To The Hermitage (TTH) by Malcolm Bradbury is a most rewarding, if occasionally challenging, book. It contains two parallel stories. One story describes the great French philosopher and intellectual Denis Diderot, contemporary of Voltaire's and author/editor of the monumental Encyclopedia, finally making the perilous journey in 1773 from Paris to St. Petersburg. With this trip, he is fulfilling his long-avoided promise to visit Catherine the Great, who had purchased his vast library for her collection. The other story is a modern academic/artistic pilgrimage, The Diderot Project, following partly in the philosopher's footsteps to St. Petersburg on the eve of violent social change in Russia (in 1993).

One odd thing is that I read Katherine Neville's The Eight while reading TTH, and they had many of the same characters, in addition to having the same sort of temporally-split story line featuring contemporary and 18th century settings. The Eight is a thriller that mixes old myths, chess and modern intrigue. It pre-dates The Da Vinci Code by many years (published in 1988) and is quite well written, only losing some taughtness of storyline towards the end. What TTH and The Eight have in common is a large number of real historical characters, and reading them nearly simultaneously helped me recall or learn some history through immersion in Europe before (1773) and during (1789) the French Revolution.

What does one feel on first looking into a 500 page novel about a philosopher and some academics and sundry artistic types? I could admit to a little trepidation, even being a huge fan of Bradbury's. Luckily, the author put me at ease immediately, after a brief introduction, with an uproariously hilarious Chapter One. It begins with the remarkable shell game played on our modern narrator, an English novelist, by a delightful Swedish bank teller, who reduces a decent amount of English money to a tiny number of American dollars by a process of charging tax at every possible opportunity (and some that seem impossible). The bank converts everything to Swedish kronor both coming and going . All of this is done while denying the validity of credit cards (in 1993!) and offering the most cheerful, beautiful, blond, blue-eyed smiling face. The IRS might want to note the deadly tactics.

A series of initially confusing chapters take place THEN, with the great philosopher, but these are sandwiched in between each chapter taking place NOW, where we are treated to the most accessible and frequently funny assemblage of Diderot Project members and their subsequent departure on a ship to St. Petersburg. The events leading up to departure include a continual comedy of manners and errors, starting with

• A futile search of Stockholm for René Descartes’ tomb
• It turns out that Descartes died in Stockholm, but the journey that his remains took outdoes even the Australian Philosophers' Song for Groucho Marxian hilarity (see the link for lyrics or YouTube for audio/video). Trying to trace the remains of M. Descartes could reduce a man to tears.
• An extraordinarily chilly reception by our English narrator's Swedish hosts, the married couple Bo and Alma Luneberg (Bo is on the committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it is part of his job to give false hope to writers everywhere, as sincerely as possible).
  
• Alma essentially says, "we would have been happy to bring you to our home for dinner instead of to this crummy little restaurant, but in Sweden, we keep our homes for our real friends." Such warmth!
  
• The absolute inability of the poor narrator to convince his hosts that, as much as he likes it, he does not want to eat herring yet again on his first day in Sweden.

Then, while we begin to develop a feel for Diderot himself and for the form his story of 1773 will take, we meet gorgeous opera singer Birgitta Lindhorst, Swedish diplomat Anders Manders, skilled cabinetmaker Sven Sonnenburg, hip American professor Jack-Paul Verso (author of The Feminists' Wittgenstein) and other project members. In spite of the battle beginning between Boris Yeltsin and hard-line Russian communists, the group leaves port to sail up the Baltic and into Russia, accompanied by a dazzling assortment of chambermaids, bartenders, exotic dancers, and waitresses, all seemingly named Tatyana.

It turns out that the 18th century was a dangerous time for philosophers: a time when Emperors and Empresses needed the great men as advisers in court, but given the nature of the advice and nature of the men, a time when the philosophers often wound up in prison.

So it is with some justified fear that Diderot allows himself to be delivered, through a painful journey, to the court of Catherine. He proceeds to write a treatise on how to improve Russia, which he delivers once a week in written and spoken form to the Tzarina (I paraphrase):

• "What, you want me to free the Serfs? Are you mad? They would rise up against me!"
• "But no, Your Most Imperial Majesty, they would not, because of the extreme gratitude they would owe you. They would be your loyal servants."
• "They are my loyal servants now, with no option to be otherwise. I think it is better. Let us discuss something else- reform of my police force, perhaps."

So we find in Diderot quite an American sense of Democracy, one might say.

As the modern Diderot Project members travel to and around St. Petersburg, its members become rather dispersed, and the concept of The Project seems to crumble due to the combined and contradictory pressures of, for example, the charming Tatyana from Puskin and the thrilling examination of the remains of Diderot's library. The discovery of volumes signed by Diderot, with extensive notes in the margins, and similar volumes with Voltaire's imprint, is, to our novelist, like discovering the lost library of Alexandria. Jack-Paul Verso's discoveries tend more towards Pushkin, and I don't mean the author!

I find that in trying to capture the book I can only come up with a pale imitation of the original, so, enough with the synopsis! Suffice it to say that there are long discussions, practical, theoretical, and always with a hint of danger, that occupy Diderot and his patron, and Denis is quite happy to depart home for France as long as he doesn't have to worry about being executed for treason when he arrives. He achieves his goal eventually.

At the same time, the apparently disintegrated Diderot Project really ends up providing each member with what (or whom) he or she sought. Plans are already being drawn up for a second Project, if only, Alma reminds everyone, they would write their papers on Diderot before arriving, next time.

So what is the bottom line? This book might not be for everyone, but if you have a love of history, or philosophy, or writing, or language, and a desire to learn a bit about vastly disparate European cultures while laughing quite a lot through the nervous times of the 1770's and 1990's, pick it up right away.

© James K. Bashkin, 2007

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