Sun 3 Jan 2010
Review: STEVE BERRY – The Charlemagne Pursuit.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[4] Comments
STEVE BERRY – The Charlemagne Pursuit. Ballantine; paperback reprint, November 2009. Hardcover edition: Ballantine Books, December 2008.
I don’t think I could make you believe how much in awe I am of authors who can write mystery thrillers that are over 530 pages long, and in one of those new oversized paperback formats to boot.
I enjoy reading them too – all those characters, both major and minor; plots and subplots – even though they take me almost two weeks of semi-steady reading to get through them.
Definition: semi-steady. Fifty to sixty pages a night, sometimes nearly a hundred, especially when the end is in sight.
I did not know that The Charlemagne Pursuit is the fourth of Steve Berry’s books that a fellow named Cotton Malone, a former Justice Department agent, is in, nor did I need to, but it was at least somewhat clear that he had been through the mill like this before. By the mill, I mean finding himself in next to non-stop adventure, although not all of the action involves him. At a full 500 pages’ worth, if it did, he’d be huffing and puffing like all get out when this one ends, and lo and behold, The Charlemagne Pursuit ends exactly where The Paris Vendetta (2009, with a brief preview provided) begins.
This one involves some history (Charlemagne’s court and some historical documents found relating thereto); some leftover business left over from the World War II and the Cold War (a Nazi submarine landing in Antarctica, a US submarine trapped under the Antarctic ice in 1971); and some current day ideas about the possibility of a master race and civilization that lived in early historic times – before the Romans, before the Greeks, before the Phoenicians, before everybody.
And the spark that kindles the whole affair: Cotton Malone’s father was one of the men aboard the experimental sub who died in it when it sank, and whose death has been covered up ever since – by whom, and why?
There are a lot of deaths that occur along the way (but none terribly gory), many of them orchestrated by someone still in power in the US, and the others by a pair of maniac-obsessive sisters whose father and grandfather (a former Nazi) left them an heritage of secrets, but about what they do not know.
There is also plenty of action, as if I hadn’t said (or hinted at) before. I kind of wish it hadn’t all ended quite so abruptly, but even the longest of 530 page thrillers have to end sometime. If I haven’t made myself clear until now, I wouldn’t have minded if it had been longer.
The Cotton Malone series —
1. The Templar Legacy (2006)
2. The Alexandria Link (2007)
3. The Venetian Betrayal (2007)
4. The Charlemagne Pursuit (2008)
5. The Paris Vendetta (2009)
January 3rd, 2010 at 3:05 am
I don’t know whether to call these guilty pleasures or junk food for the mind, but I confess I devour far too many of them, and Berry is one of my favorites with James Rollins, Matt Reilly, Jack Du Bruhl, and of course the father of the sub-genre Clive Cussler.
Admittedly sometimes there is a lot to forgive in literary terms, and your willing suspension of disbelief can get a hernia reading them (or just picking them up), but for sheer audacity, headlong narrative, and chutzpah they are hard to beat. Anyway it is as close as you are likely to get to Talbot Mundy’s JIMGRIM or the Colin Gray thrillers of Mark Channing these days, and as both a historian and something of a fan of scientific speculation (or to be fair in most of these cases the most pseudo of the pseudo sciences)these can be a tonic. I certainly prefer this to the equally heavy Tom Clancy style tomes where right wing politics collide with JANES. At least no one ever took these seriously enough to start a war over them.
Indeed we may well be in the golden age of this type of thriller. I even like Ted Bell’s Alexander Hawke series despite the fact that some of his ideas of English aristocracy went out with Lord Peter and he seems to think you can drive from Gibralter to Cannes in two hours — a journey of close on 1,000 miles… I guess when you are saving the world you don’t have time for geography.
For my money these fill the same gap that was once filled by Dumas, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, Ian Fleming and other grand tellers of extravagant tales. True they aren’t as literate as Buchan, Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Household, or some of the others of that school, but they are fun, and that’s all most of them intend to be. I suppose the writers they are closest to are Alistair Maclean, Geoffrey Jenkins, and Desmond Bagley.
Check out some of Bill Napier’s entries in the genre (he’s a bit more literate than most and his science is much better); William Dietrich’s historical series set in Napoleonic times; and David Gibbons, a good Brit writer in the genre.
The pulps live in these, and I have to give many of the writers high marks not only for imagination, but for choreographing and constructing the action. It’s no easy task to keep all the balls up in the air for 500 + pages and then bring everything together for a rousing finale — and if there is tendency to leave a few loose ends for the next book it probably isn’t fair to complain — popular fiction has been stringing us along from installment to installment since the days of Dickens, and you have to imagine Homer went to bed a few nights with a smile on his lips knowing his listeners would spend the night worrying if Odysseus was going to escape that Cyclops cave.
I know quite a few purists loathe these and the whole Dan Brown school as well, and I grant there are high and low points, but while no one is claiming potato chips are good for you, so long as they aren’t the only thing you consume they certainly have their place — and as they used to say, no one can eat just one …
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:15 am
Read about 100 pages of this and put it down. Bad writing, wooden dialogue. Too many good books out there to bother with this.
January 3rd, 2010 at 12:43 pm
David
You understood perfectly what I was hoping I was saying. Thank you!
Steve
You’re a better person than I. Once started, I almost never quit on a book, even if my boat hasn’t been rocked in the slightest.
— Steve
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Ron Goulart coined a phrase that seems to fit here — “Great Bad Writers.” I think it is a fair term that explains the popularity of writers as disparate as Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas, and Bram Stoker (some one once volunteered that DRACULA was the best bad book ever written).
Most of these writers had flaws, but they were storytellers, and storytelling trumped clunky prose, wooden dialogue, and cardboard characters. And the Great Bad Writers include a long list of writers many of us love — Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer, Erle Stanley Gardner, Zane Gray (along with ERB and Wallace, Gray has even been reprinted by Oxford University Press), Max Brand, Jules Verne …
In all honesty if exceptional writing was the only thing I looked for I probably would never have been a mystery fan in the first place, much less enjoyed the pulps or most popular literature. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten far in science fiction where the imagination of many a bad writer is treasured yet. Even Brian Aldiss pointed out in THE TRILLION YEAR SPREE that the genre was “saved” from H.G. Wells brilliant pedantry by ERB’s fantastic imagination.
There are, of course, simply bad writers, and some of them are working in the thriller genre (John Ringo is not only unreadable but patently offensive), but I don’t think Berry falls in that category. I do understand anyone not liking a book or a writer and that is justified, but while Berry is no stylist, for me he writes perfectly acceptable prose.
American writer and critic John Gardner pointed out in an essay on writing that there was nothing wrong with enjoying a comic book, or junk fiction, or the READER’s DIGEST at the dentist office. I think sometimes we miss the essential qualities of writers we might not like. I can’t say I ever enjoyed Jackie Collins or Danielle Steel, but I understand that they give their readership what it wants. Joke as we might about a Barbara Cartland her readers were devoted because she consistently produced books they wanted to read.
It’s always easy to decry the general lack of taste of the great reading public, but keep in mind among those “popular” writers are names like Shakespeare and Dickens, Twain and Hugo. Even the majority is right sometimes.
Steve
I agree about seldom putting aside a book unfinished. I may have to come back to one once in while if I don’t get in it fast enough, but even some bad books at least teach valuable lessons. And to be perfectly fair there is many a great work of literature that just didn’t appeal to me however much I might admire the writer’s skill and accomplishment (I’m still annoyed about having to read SILAS MARNER).
Maybe its the Puritan ethic — or a left over of clean the plate — once started I feel guilty if I don’t at least make an effort to get to the end, though I’ll grant a few books have won the struggle over the years.