The Last Secret of the Temple by Paul Sussman, Atlantic Monthly Press, 555 pages, $24
Paul Sussman's massive novel promises to unfold a stunning secret that will link the destruction of the Temple and the depredations of the Holocaust with a hope for a peaceful conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The mystery at the heart of the book isn't so bad − it has a few interesting twists and a fairly compelling detective investigating it − but, as the harebrained geopolitical dimension comes to the fore, these elements are smothered by so many other deeply predictable narrative strands and so much archaeological-historical grandstanding that the real mystery is how ?(as the jacket proclaims?) a million copies had already been sold internationally before its U.S. publication this fall.
Actually, that's not such a mystery. "The Last Secret of the Temple" is another in the ever-growing thriller sub-genre of "The Da Vinci Code" wannabes. As an illustration of how that sub-genre works, I remind you that Dan Brown's ill-written megasplash turned on the role the Knights Templar played in protecting the bloodline of Jesus. Not only does "The Last Secret of the Temple" eventually get around to playing the Templar card (though it takes 209 pages), but its publicity materials include praise from the authors of "The Last Templar" and "The Templar Legacy."
"The Da Vinci Code" sold more than 60 million copies, so if one in 60 of those readers was seduced by the dustcover of Sussman's tome and its promise of a book that "will be compared to Dan Brown's eight-hundred-pound gorilla, [but] is so much more," then, bingo, you have a million copies sold.
The problem with all these cod "Code" books is that the conspiracy at the heart of the original was enormously improbable (Jesus' bloodline is alive and well and its latest manifestation is living in the Scottish Lowlands), forcing each of Brown's Code cadets to up the ante with plots in which something quite inconceivably mammoth is at stake. In Sussman's epic formulation, not only is the very future of mankind at risk, but - and, bizarrely, this is more central to the plot - so is that ineffectual peace initiative put forth a while back by Sari Nusseibeh and Ami Ayalon.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to Sussman?s opening chapters. It's 70 C.E., and the high priest of the Temple hides the menorah from the Holy of Holies before the Romans can get their hands on it. Cut to Bavaria, 1944, as six concentration camp prisoners drag a large crate into an abandoned mine, before being executed. (Hey, could that be the menorah in there?...) Then we're off to contemporary Egypt, where an elderly German living in Luxor is killed and Inspector Khalifa of the local police force is assigned the case. (That German, hey, isn't he about the right age to have been, you know, a Nazi??)
Well, it turns out the German was killed randomly by a scorpion, but Khalifa recalls the case of an old Israeli woman murdered in Luxor 10 years previously and the Egyptian who was fingered for it, whom Khalifa always knew was innocent, and, hmm, didn't that old Israeli woman have some kind of blue number tattooed on her forearm? (Whoa, you're blowing my mind. Could the old German, who might have been a Nazi, have killed the old Israeli woman? But why? And what sinister powers in the anti-Israeli Egyptian police force covered things up by framing a local sap?)
Khalifa goes against the wishes of his superiors and investigates. What he discovers may save the future of humanity. But it can't save this book.
Saving the peace
In a sense, it's okay for the plot to sound a little silly, because this is a thriller after all, a genre that's supposed to test credibility. The most tiresome aspect of the book, however, is Sussman's insistence on tying an essentially workable mystery to the high-stakes tedium of Middle East peace efforts. It causes him to construct the last third of the book around the drama of saving a real peace plan that anyone who reads the paper could've told you would be a failure before it was launched. It also leads him into scenes that come just close enough to reality to illustrate how caricatured and cliched they actually are. One of the main characters, an obnoxiously plucky Palestinian-English journalist, finds herself engaged in the kind of political discussion that would be wearisome enough if it were real; in a fictional representation, it's screamworthy. Get this:
"'Barak offered him ninety-seven per cent of the West Bank - His own bloody state. And he turned it down!'
'What he was offered, as you well know... were a collection of cantons surrounded by illegal settlements'
'Abbas and Qureia mean well, but they just don't command enough respect to cut a realistic deal and bring all their people with them. The Palestinians need a new figurehead.'
'Dahlan and Rajoub haven't got the power base. Erekat's a non-starter. Barghouti's in prison. There's no one else.'"
If you don't get up and leave the room when real people start on the who-screwed-up-Camp-David debate, maybe you'll even stick with this book as far as the compendious Glossary at its end. Here Sussman completes his attempt to root his fiction in reality, with definitions of everything Middle Eastern, Egyptological and Byzantine, from babaganoush to borscht, from Saladin to "Schlomo" Artzi. Sussman has certainly done his research, but it only serves to make his plot seem even more fanciful. There's much apparent erudition, but it doesn't add up to intelligence.
Often Sussman's desire for verisimilitude reveals a rather comic tin ear. Early in the book, a small team of extreme right-wing religious Israelis are setting a bomb in Jerusalem's Old City (Heard that one before? Remember Robert Stone's awful if much acclaimed "Damascus Gate"?), when one of them shows signs of conscience. Their nasty leader berates him: "This is no place for a nebbish, Shmuely." Now if a guy named Shmuely can't be a nebbish, who can?
A fundamental weakness of the "Da Vinci Code" sub-genre that's amply in evidence in "The Last Secret of the Temple" is an overtly cinematic structure. Most chapters are short, and they jump rapidly from Jerusalem to the Valley of the Kings to Cambridge to Berchtesgaden, like the cuts of a movie thriller with often unhelpful headings ("Egypt - between Luxor and Edfu"). It's clear the author's writing with the big screen - and its big bucks - in mind. The problem with this technique in a novel is that it hampers character development for the major characters and gives us too much pointless detail for minor characters.
For example, we get a sketch several pages long of one of the prisoners hauling the crate at the beginning of the book. Yitzhak Edelstein casts his mind back to his childhood in Dresden with his lovely sister Rivka, whom he recently witnessed being murdered by Nazis. Obviously, we think, the author's setting this guy up to be an important character. Then the Nazis shoot Edelstein and that's the last we hear of him. As a character, all he had to do was haul the crate. The rest of the chapter - from his name to his chat with the rabbi beside him in the truck to his sympathy for the homosexual prisoner who's lost his shoe in the snow and his reminiscences about how Rivka used to call him "Yitzi, witzy, mitzy, ditzy" - is irrelevant, unless there are readers so busy devouring "Da Vinci Code" knockoffs that they've never noticed that the Nazis took pleasure in being bad.
Only with Inspector Khalifa does Sussman advance a little beyond the realm of tedious character cliche. Perhaps that's the biggest shame in the book, because the scenes in which Khalifa appears are quite absorbing, as is the Egyptian detective's investigation. When the narrative strands combine in the final third of the novel, Khalifa brought into contact with the other major characters - the Palestinian-English journalist, a "hard-drinking" Israeli detective, and the chief of the nasty right-wing Israeli nationalists - and his engaging thoughtfulness is overwhelmed by the whiz-bangs of the apocalyptic plot. (In the laughable climax, the explosions are so redolent of mediocre Hollywood blockbusters that they seem only to lack hundreds of henchmen fleeing in red jumpsuits as James Bond blows up the lair of Dr. No.).
Matt Beynon Rees is the author of "The Collaborator of Bethlehem," the first in a mystery series about a Palestinian detective, and the forthcoming novel "A Grave in Gaza."
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