I just finished The Sinai Tapestry, which is the first book in The Jerusalem Quartet (published in 1977), and it's pretty great stuff. I didn't know much about Whittemore going in, except that Jeff VanderMeer cites him as one of his three favorite writers (along with Nabokov and Angela Carter), but I'm now committed to reading the entire Quartet. Oh, I did read his first novel, Quin's Shanghai Circus, which is good, but I think The Sinai Tapestry is much better,
This book actually covers some of the same ground as Against the Day, focusing mainly on the the late Victorian period and climaxing around 1922, though the scope is narrower, limited mostly to the Middle East. Also, a sordid affair that would take up a chapter for Pynchon generally takes up a couple pages for Whittemore. The main comparison between the two would have to be in humor and subject matter. Stylistically I'd say Whittemore is closer to Vonnegut, though.
It's a complex plot with many eccentric and compelling characters, such as Haj Haroun, a 3,000 year old resident of Jerusalem dedicated to protecting the city despite his senility, or Strongbow, a seven foot tall English lord who rejects the aristocracy, becomes a holy man in the Middle East, writes a sexual encyclopedia, and is comes to secretly own the Ottoman Empire. He's more than a little "mythic," and by the end you have to wonder whether what you've been told about him is just the exaggerated stories that the more modern characters have heard about him.
The main plot revolves around a book that may be the oldest "Bible" in the world, although it reveals everything anyone thinks about religion to be false, but in some ways this is just a MacGuffin to get at the history of the conflicts in this part of the world. A lot hinges on the Turkish genocide of Armenians, for example. Whittemore was apparently a CIA agent in the 50's and 60's and worked in Jerusalem. Really interesting stuff.
I understand that the three other books of the Quartet aren't "sequels" in the strictest sense, but rather tell the story of minor characters and seemingly incidental plot points from the previous books, changing everything we once thought we knew about what was going on. In any case, I tracked them all down used on the internet and am about to get started on the second. Anybody else ever hear of this guy? |
