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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Thrillers for the PhD crowd

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wembley can change in 28 days

10:51 / 24.03.05

I was in need of trash, apparently, and boy did I get it: I recently read The DaVinci Code and, as if that weren't enough, continued on to read The Rule of Four. Both were compelling-ish in that cheap paperback kind of way, but the thing that really kept me turning pages was the historical, it-really-exists fantastic secret, unlockable by only the most trained intellects.

I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History way back in high school and loved it to pieces; when I found out what the monks were actually searching for in The Name of the Rose, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention. Such knowledge is only to be dreamed of...

Which is why I wonder what else is in this genre. I love the idea that occult secrets could be given hints of credibility by tying them in to actual people/events/really old books, and I love the plotlines where everybody's prepared to die or kill or both in the name of a fantastic secret. And I'm very, very happy if they explain a thing or two about architecture or Mozart or hieroglyphics along the way. But I'm just not going to trudge through another sloppily-written Code or Four; I just can't take shoddy writing anymore (aside from tolerating my own, of course).

Alternately, what about books that require you to figure out the riddles for yourself? Not that I even got past Nick Bantock's Egyptian Jukebox, but I'm willing to try.

What have you read?

12:43 / 24.03.05

The Name of the Rose is great, but I have always loved Foucault's Pendulum best. When I see smart people reading The DaVinci Code, I try to reccomend "a book just like that, but without the suck."

That'd be Foucault's Pendulum - insane layers of conspiracy and occultism, the fractured Fascist v. Communist politics of postwar Italy, and a really interesting take on the nature of conspiracy and secrets.

11:38 / 25.03.05

Read Neal Stephenson! Lots of fun history and conspiracies mixed in. Start with 'Cryptonomicon' or 'Quicksilver'....

Thomas Pynchon is good for fun conspiracies too.. 'Crying of Lot 49', 'Mason and Dixon', and 'V.' are my favourites...

at the scarwash

17:01 / 25.03.05

well, the grandaddy of all wacky "the truth is out there" compendiums (compendiae?) of Hidden Truth is Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Credulous, poorly documented, and chock full of fun facts about hidden alchemical traditions and the Nazi expedition to find the entrance to the Hollow Earth.

09:45 / 26.03.05

Morning Of The Magicians is indeed great - Ok, they got a bit carried away, but they were too excited to bother with all that much research. And after all, 'never let the facts get in the way of a good story.'

I say this here with all the confidence of a Christian in Rome back in the early days, but if you've not read it, there's also the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - the early Seventies Bay Area Wavy Gravy-isms may or may not grate a bit these days, but if you can get over those, it's still good fun, I'd say.

And The Fifth Gospel by David Alexander is a kind of ultra-decadent version of similar themes to those explored in the Da Vinci code, I gather - the ending's more than a little much, but again, and if it's still in print, it's probably worth a shot.

Also, there's a book called The Zealator - I forget who wrote it, borrowed it off a friend, don't have a copy to hand etc, but it's supposedly the autobiographical account of modern day Christian magician's working life. As to whether Christian magicians are strictly 'on-message' doctrine-wise, well it's debatable certainly, and I probably read too much of this stuff generally, but I always think that if it's decently, or at least intelligently-written, I'm inclined to believe the guy. So I enjoyed this a lot.

09:40 / 01.04.05

Leaning more towards the Eco side than the Brown side:

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

An instance Of The Fingerpost by Ian Pears

Both of which make most excellent holiday reading in that they're well-written and compelling but don't leave the nasty aftertaste of "good lord that's 500 pages I'll never get back" that, say, Angels and Demons did for me.

11:08 / 10.04.05

Pretty much Eco-lite but still great fun is The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez Reverte. Mysterious 16thC Satantic books and dodgy antique book dealers. It was made into a pretty dull film called the Ninth Gate by Polanski a few years ago with Jonny Depp. The books better.

14:55 / 18.04.05

Just to add to the Neal Stephenson comment, if you'd like to know a little about memetics, semiotics, computer viruses and linguistics, check out Snow Crash, one of the best sci-fi thrillers I have ever read.

15:22 / 18.04.05

Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers is just great, as are Jealousy and In the Labyrinth and The Voyeur. Of course you have to like the New Novel form which really destroys what it means to be a novel. Lots of people don't. But if you do like experimental prose, cinematic techniques applied to narrative, and 10 page long descriptions of banana plantations, then Robbe-Grillet is the man!

10:46 / 08.07.05

More on the maths side of things than the art history... I've just read The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez, which was great fun -it's set around the time Andrew Wiles solved Fermant's last theorum, and is about two mathematicians in Oxford and a series of murders that seem to be calculated to catch their attention. It's a quick read, only about 200 pages, and whilst the characters can be a bit sketchy I enjoyed it...

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

14:50 / 12.07.05

I'll second V by Thomas Pynchon.

and London Fields by Martin Amis
or the Black Tower by John Fowles

mind you, the Fowles is a collection of short stories in which one of them is a metawhodunnit.

enjoy
>pablo

15:48 / 12.07.05

The Shadow of the Wind (UK) (US) is breathtaking.

I picked it up on the basis of a realy strong in-store review at a bookstore and was blown away. The blurbs say that it spent the better part of a year at the #1 slot in Spain, but the translation feels really transparent.

It's this great gothic story set in Barcelona after the Civil War, and involves the Library of Lost Books, and a possibly haunted house, and... it's just delicious. Seriously, I can't reccomend it strongly enough.

A fall of geckos

17:31 / 12.07.05

I'd recommend The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin. I believe all three were publishes over an eighteen month period and were the result of a bust of creative energy he experienced while dealing with his mother's paranoid schizophrenia. He later published books under the pseudo name Gregory Tree - I believe some of these books were re-issued under his real name, but these weren't much good and should be avoided. Sometimes the novels stray into the preposterous but even so these books are compulsive reading.

The three Bardin novels are extremely odd psychological stories dressed up as crime fiction. Bardin plays a fair number of tricks with untrustworthy narrators creating a dreamy feel where our certainty of reality is broken down. The Deadly Percheron starts with the narrator - a psychiatrist - meeting a man who wants to be told that he's mad. He thinks little people are paying him to do meaningless and odd things. One gives him ten dollars a day to wear a purple suit. Another pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall. Another pays him money to give quarters to random people. If he's mad, this would be ok, because he would know that the little people aren't real and the world would make a kind of sense. The only problem is if he's mad, how has he been making a living. He hasn't touched his savings in months. The psychiatrist investigates and the weirdness spreads into his world, infecting him. The Last of Philip Banter starts with an alcoholic advertising executive, with little memory of the previous night, finding a document on his office typewriter describing things that will happen in the coming day. These thing begin to happen in reality. They're all unusual, interesting books and worth reading.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:26 / 21.09.05

Recently, in another thread, the Dumas Club was recommended by Mistoffelees to Matt, who had quoted a passage on obsessive bibliophily from elsewhere:

You should read The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte. That novel is about people who really are obsessed with books, rabid collectors. The way they are described and how they talk about their passion is in the same vein as your quote.

Polanski made a movie about half of the book (The ninth gate). But the book is very different from Polanski´s movie (it´s not occult thriller).

Matt responded:

Mistoffelees, i have the distinct honour of being one of the lucky few who not only read the book, but also read the book looooong before the movie came out... (i have a really good librarian)

Mistoffelees responded:

Lucky indeed. But although I´ve read the novel after seeing the movie, I was not cursed with imagining the characters like they were portrayed in the movie (I imagined Corso to be older and heavier for example).

Did you like any of Perez-Reverte´s other books?

The only other book by Perez-Reverte, that I´ve read is The Seville Communion, which I found boring.

Anyone else on the Dumas Club, which I confess I abandoned after about ten pages?

*

16:47 / 21.09.05

I read The Club Dumas recently. I enjoyed it, mostly for the same reasons I enjoyed the movie— I love old books, and I found the book and the movie horrifying in that sort of sick "watching a car crash about to happen" way because of various characters leaning over the books while fiercely puffing on a Gauloise, ripping pages out of 16th c. sole editions, etc. That's horror for me. (I'm only sort of kidding.) But, critically speaking, the author was too transparently trying to be a more accessible Umberto Eco with some noir flavor, and while he succeeds, I hope he can do a bit better than that. I actually want to check out The Fencing Master, but I'm expecting it to be more thriller than Ph.D., which is fine by me.

I'm about to start reading Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist, which I purchased at the same time, and I will discover if it fits this genre and deserves to be mentioned here. Umberto Eco's Baudolino probably only fits here by virtue of its author's name; it's not really a thriller, but it is intellectual and a good read. It's more a coming-of-age, hero's quest kind of story, although there is a central mystery. It's also intimately connected with Serendipities, his collection of essays and lectures about the impact of falsehood and delusion on history, and it's worthwhile reading the two together, or at least it was for me.

The Return Of Rothkoid

06:13 / 22.09.05

Confessions Of A Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen is pretty bugfuck. Intelligent, though thoroughly bugfuck.

Lawrence Norfolk's stuff is pretty good, too.

lonely as a cloud...

07:46 / 22.09.05

I read The Rule Of Four 'cos it proclaimed itself to be "The Da Vinci Code for smart people", or something like that. It was, IMHO, well written, but NOTHING AT ALL HAPPENS IN IT! Christ.
Nice to see this thread, though, 'cos I adored Foucault's Pendulum, and am a complete sucker for that kinda thing.

15:24 / 22.09.05

As regards books with puzzles in, I recently read ‘Popco’ by Scarlett Thomas, and that has a fair amount of puzzlestuff in it, and reminded me of ‘Cryptonomicon’ to some extent. Some interesting anti-corporations threads too, without being preachy, and even a reference to groups called ‘invisibles’.
Oh, and ‘The List of Seven’ by Mark Frost, if you can find it. May be out of print, but it’s worth a look.

Crux Is This City's Protector.

03:41 / 23.09.05

Two books come to mind—neither are thrillers, but they're both rich and redolent with that same sense of mystery you describe; the possibly-fake-but-presented-as-historical account of long-lost secret histories. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and pretty much all of Jorge Luis Borges' short fiction (f'rinstance, Labyrinths). Highly, highly recommended.

07:03 / 23.09.05

The "List of Seven" by Mark Frost is really good. It's a occult thriller starring Arthur Conan Doyle and the (made up) individual he would later base Holmes on and the author is one of the writers of Twin Peaks. It has guest appearances by Bram Stoker & Helena Blavatsky and is a fun little read exactly in the vein of this thread. I recommend it and could probably get hold of a copy if anyone is interested.

07:44 / 23.09.05

The follow-up, The Six Messiahs, isn’t so bad, either. Ends a bit hastily for my tastes, but it’s a good read, with some interesting ideas.

08:46 / 23.09.05

Anything by Phillip K. Dick, the mad old bugger.

11:17 / 23.09.05

I've not read "The Six Messiahs". I'll look out for it.

17:03 / 23.09.05

I'm currently reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, which is being called "The Dracula Code" by reviewers. It's about 700 pages of dry history and random characters falling in love and running from pseudo-vampires. There's an entire section, almost a hundred pages, of the behavior of French monks. I'm not kidding. At least with Dan Brown, there was a goal to be reached, a bomb or some other bullshit. With this novel, it just goes on and on about these academics in tweed jackets (literally. I'm not kidding) running around in libraries looking at papers. One of the few things about this novel that is interesting is the complexities of the characters; these are not one dimensional people (other than the nameless narrator (Elizabeth Kostova herself, if you believe the press). The secondary cast is vivid and interesting. The locales are exotic and are described extrememly efficiently by the author. She has the gift of creating a mental picture of some castle without paragraphs of description, just a sentence will suffice. It's very nice (pardon the rhyme).

Yes, this is the Matt of the Club Dumas discussion. At the risk of creating a complicated mix of discussion over numerous threads, I'll link to the Club Dumas stuff, here, which is really a thread on quotes....

I've read only one other book by PerezReverte, and that was The Flander's Panel, a boring thriller about chess.... I instantly compared it to Katherine Neville's The Eight, which was recently republished thanks to Dan Brown. I was lucky enough to have found a pre-DaVinci Code version of The Eight, published in 1988! The Eight has two stories running parallel, two nuns looking for some chess pieces, and a random very-Eighties powerwoman computer expert looking for the same pieces. On the back of the paperback, there's a quaint quote from The Washington Post Book World. They write, "A feminist answer to Radiers of the Lost Ark". It just gives me a giggle considering how unbelievably Eighties the book is....

The Eight

The Eight

*

19:41 / 23.09.05

I seem to recall hating The List of Seven; maybe I should give it a reread. It's only been about ten years since I read it, so my tastes have certainly changed.

19:52 / 23.09.05

I know it wasn't your intention Matt but you've made The Historian sound enticing. The Dumas Club is something else on my shelf that I haven't picked up since I bought it. Yet again I'm going to have a leaf through soon.

21:21 / 23.09.05

Wait. It wasn't my intention to dissuade people from reading it. I just wanted to present an alternate review than what the critics were saying. It's still a decent book no matter how much I bashed it. Sorry for the confusion.

02:27 / 24.09.05

I second (or third?) the Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I know quite a bit about 19th century America, and from my perspective this book doesn't stumble at all--i.e., get basic facts wrong, or just the general feel of the time--as many historical novels do. And, well, it's just a fun kind of well-written murder mystery with lots of Dante intertwined.

21:02 / 24.09.05

The Eight was our book group's pick last month. A riproaring read and well-researched, but the prose often set my teeth on edge.

lonely as a cloud...

12:07 / 11.10.05

I knew I'd spotted The Historian here somewhere...reading it at the moment, and it's quite engaging, in an occasionally overly melodramatic kind of way. And, yes, some of the descriptions of landscapes are gorgeous.

01:43 / 12.10.05

Wait until you get to the monks.

10:27 / 31.10.05

I just read the Dante Club and can add my recommendation to the list. Quite well-written and very enjoyable. And lots and lots of beards. In fact it was a close race between the number of beards and the number of middle names possessed by the characters.

18:00 / 31.10.05

Nick Tosches's "In the Hand of Dante" is a pretty excellent hard-boiled conspiracy mystery. Callous violence and first-person flashbacks to Dante at the time of Beatrice's death. Good times.

07:56 / 30.09.06

I thought The Rule of Four to be horrible. A mildly intriguing subject--a crytic medieval text--but such turgid and overwrought and simply melodramatic writng. At least half of the book has nothing to do with the actual plot, but is a kind of guided tour of Yale and its environs. The authors seem to be crying out "Hey everyone, we went to Yale and know all about it! Let me describe it to you for the next 5 pages!"...ad nauseum. The action (what little there is) is confused, and the characters are as dull as wood. I can't believe all the positive reviews it got. The DaVinci code was silly, but at least Dan Brown kept it compelling.

Ok, end of rant. This thread is so old I doubt anyone will read it anyway...

14:43 / 05.10.06

Recently started to read The Historian, got 100 pages in and realised I couldn’t care less, and that I still had 6/7 of the book to go. Moved on to something else.

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