The More the Merrier
When it’s as hot out as it’s been these past few days, my appetite for food plummets. I stay as far away from the stove as I can, trying to eat the simplest possible fare that requires the least preparation–less is more. With my reading, though, I’m the opposite. When the temperature rises, the more literary ingredients the better. Give me a meaty plot that’s sauced with complex intrigue, pages that positively overflow with incident. Maybe the heat makes my brain expand to leave room for extra helpings? Whatever the reason, it’s been an excellent month for big books and plenitudinous platefuls.
Foremost among my recent reads was the debut novel from Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief. It focuses on a place that’s many places all at once, Venice. In Renaissance Italy, the craftsmen of that city perfect a new technology, the glass mirror, and guard its secrets with deadly strength, which doesn’t prevent a brilliant thief from scheming to steal the arcane knowledge the whole world desires. Centuries later, in the shabby seaside community of Venice Beach, California, a Kerouackian drifter attempts to unlock the mystery of an ancient text–is it fiction or a coded instruction manual?–that relates the thief’s adventures. And in the glitzy, ersatz realm of present-day Las Vegas, gamblers, soldiers of fortune, and mystics gather at the Venetian resort for an explosive final confrontation.
This is a book that was near-legendary among booksellers before it was even published, its manuscript passed from hand to hand accompanied by the most glowing recommendations you’ve ever heard. So many of us clamored to add our blurbs that the indie press darlings at Melville House created a special website to share them all, not to mention a YouTube video that includes yours truly. If that doesn’t convince you to give The Mirror Thief a try, perhaps a New York Times review by Scarlett Thomas will do the trick: “How this book got published is a complete mystery to me. Not because it is not good enough, but rather because it is too good.”
Filling as it is, it only whetted my appetite for more, so I turned to Septimania by Jonathan Levi, a glorious love story that starts in the 1970s with a brief encounter in an organ loft and continues through a half-century of time and a continent’s-worth of locations. Along his lovers’ and his readers’ way, Levi strews Newtonian physics, terrorism, the Arabian Nights, a color-changing elephant, street theater, classical music, and much else besides. Septimania is both a kingdom and a concept, the first named after the seven Mediterranean cities it comprises and the latter describing the seven-natured madness of romance. Septimania the novel sprawls and meanders and delights in coincidence and creativity, much as the best work of John Irving does. You don’t consume something like this every day with your brown-bag lunch; it’s a feast for special occasions.
Still hungry, I devoured Arcadia by Iain Pears, a novel that both looks back into the past and reaches for the future. Somewhere in the middle is an Oxford professor and part-time spy who follows in the footsteps of his forebears J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis by spending his spare time creating a highly detailed imaginary world. His literary fantasy becomes reality and eventually inspires a dictatorial dystopia, but it may also provide the key to undoing the damage it inadvertently brought about. If, that is, a “psychomathematician” from the future can travel back to the past and stop the damage before it starts. Each component of this story is satisfying by itself, but the way they carefully interlock makes it all the more amazing. Fans of David Mitchell’s time-bending thrillers will savor it, and so will anyone who likes seeing female characters get a chance to take the wheel. Or in this case, the wheels within wheels of a very tricky, very entertaining plot.
You should definitely take a nibble of at least one of these books, but despite the heat I hope you’re feeling peckish enough to finish all three.
–James