When I read The DaVinci Code, I thought, “I think I would have enjoyed this more if it was about Shakespeare, instead of Catholicism.”  When I read Interred With Their Bones, which had a bunch of Shakespearean actors killing each other to get at the prize, I thought, “Hmmm, maybe thrillers aren’t really my thing.  Good Shakespeare content, though.”

I’m happy to report that The Book Of Air And Shadows, by Michael Gruber, fits somewhere between the two.  I liked it quite a bit.  Which is odd, really, since there isn’t really all that much Shakespeare in it. You probably know the plot without me even having to tell you.  Somebody turns up clues to an undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript (and no, actually, it’s not Cardenio).  You notice how it’s never the manuscript they find, but always some wild goose chase of clues that may or may not have a manuscript at the end?  Same deal here.

Blah blah blah, typically backstory stuff about exactly what a new Shakespeare manuscript would mean to the world, guesses at its value, and so on, and then the race is on for who gets it first, the good guys or the bad guys.  Seems innocent, then somebody dies suspiciously and we learn just how far the bad guys are willing to go…you know, the standard stuff.

The first interesting bit is that none of the characters are really all that into Shakespeare.  Sure, there are a few token Shakespeare experts thrown in, but they are minor characters.  The heroes are actually an amateur filmmaker and his  bookbinder girlfriend that work in a rare bookstore, and an intellectual property lawyer.  Throw in a liberal amount of gangsters, mostly Russian, and the rest of the story sort of writes itself.  Is it legit?  Is it all a big scam?  Who is scamming whom?  How many different groups of gangsters are in on it, and who is the spy in the ranks?

I find it amusing to comment on the book this way, since many times that is exactly what the amateur filmmaker hero does, commenting on how “If this was a movie, the gangsters would bust down that door…” and then they do. The narrative structure of the story is compelling.  It starts with the lawyer hiding out from the bad guys, and takes the form of him journalling his story up to that point.  This is intermixed with the story of the filmmaker who found the clues to the manuscript, which is told in third person.  Eventually the stories cross and you get opportunities to hear two sides of the same scene whenever both men are in the room.

Some parts, I did not love.  For instance we get to see the actual letters that are the clues to the hidden treasure.  They are mixed between chapters.  They are also written in “original spelling”, so you have to slog through pages of stuff like this (opening randomly):  “…asking always the favour of almighty God to keep me stricktlie on the path of truthfullnesse as I have muche of the olde Adam in me as thou knowest & mayhap I have told you som of it before nowe, yet you may forget and, which God foirbid, die before oure lad hath reached the age of understand, soe it is better wrote down.”   It’s one thing to get maybe a paragraph of that, but when you’ve got 3-5 pages of it in between each chapter, it takes some getting used to.  I just keep seeing it as a long stream of typos.

Secondly, it ends as all thrillers seem to do with so many twists and doublecrosses that you may lose track of what just happened.  I’m not really sure if writing a character who kept pointing out the cliche’d nature of the story helped or hurt the overall quality.  Wouldn’t the idea be to do something different than the typical script calls for, instead of taking the story out to its standard conclusion, all the while going “Yup, this is what happens next, yup, then this….”  There’s actually an answer to that question near the end, by the way, when some of the characters engage in conversation about whether movies echo humanity, or whether people define themselves around what the movies tell them is the ideal.  Which of course leads back to asking the same question of Shakespeare’s works, a common theme here on the blog.

Lastly, I didn’t love the characters all that much.  There is a weird obsession with sex in the story that seemed over the top at times.  I get that it is a defining characteristic of our narrator – he ruins his life over his obsession with sex, as a matter of fact – it just seemed a little alien to me in a novel that I thought was going to be primarily about Shakespeare.  Which reminds me, the narrator is a pretty lousy person.  There’s a whole backstory about why, and you get to decide for yourself whether you forgive him his sins, but in general, he’s a big obnoxious bully.  Which makes his parts of the story, told in first person, very interesting.

Summing up?  This is, in no way, a cut and paste thriller where the prize is a lost Shakespeare manuscript.  It could just as easily have been the Ark of the Covenant for all it mattered to the story (other than some token bits about intellectual property and copyright ownership, that is).  It’s also not that much of a thriller.  I’d almost put it more in the mystery category.  There are very few action sequences, and almost all of them are dispatched in short order.  I believe there was only one chase scene in the whole book, which yes, did have the filmmaker character commenting “Oh, and this would be the obligatory chase scene.”  I mentioned elsewhere that there are no “dun dun DUNNNN!!!” moments at the end of chapters. Given those things I am actually quite surprised to find that I enjoyed the story very much.  The narrative in particular worked very well.  It felt more…literary? To me.  It did not feel like the kind of random paperback you grab out of a rack at the airport.  You know what I’m talking about, the throwaway kind that you wouldn’t otherwise think about if you didn’t need something to do for the next 6 hours.  It was not a chore to read.  On the contrary I was a little sad when it was over. Not in the sense that I missed the characters, but in that I was enjoying the writing itself.  Does that make sense?  I think I like this Gruber fellow’s style.  Might have to look into what else he’s written, Shakespeare or no.  I suppose that ends up as something of a compliment, since I never would have known who he was if he hadn’t written a Shakespeare book.

When I heard about “The DaVinci Code, only with Shakespeare” I was intrigued and told myself I’d hunt down this Interred With Their Bones novel and see for myself if it was any good.  So I was pleased when the folks at Dutton sent me a copy for review.

There’s a couple of things that worry me about a description like “The DaVinci Code, only with Shakespeare.”  The DaVinci Code, in my opinion, was only popular because of its attack on the Catholic Church.  It wasn’t necessarily a good thriller on its own.  If you’re a publisher, you’re cool with that kind of buzz.  Whatever gets your audience reading, right?  But if you’re a writer, you might be aiming a little higher than that.

I didn’t love DaVinci Code, honestly.  Maybe I’m not that big a fan of the thriller genre.  They all seem to have a certain pattern to them, namely the race between the narrator and the killer to uncover the secret first.  Along the way the narrator runs into puzzles, solves them through some seeming act of brilliance, and then walks straight into some new character who says “It’s about time, I’ve been waiting for you for days.”

Secondly is the problem of Shakespeare, which really applies to any book that tries to have a central theme like that.  Namely, are you writing for existing fans of that subject, or trying to entice new ones?  The answer dictates how your book goes.  I fancy myself a Shakespeare geek, although who are we kidding, I am no academic.  Anybody who is in the business of studying Shakespeare (such as the author, or the main character) should know more about the subject than me, I’m thinking.  But a casual reader who is looking for the next DaVinci Code and knows nothing about Shakespeare?  Would naturally need some clues.

On this point, I’m torn, because I don’t really know what the answer is.  I’ll offer some examples, and let you decide.  It’s a thriller, so we know there’s a killer on the loose.  There’s always a killer on the loose.  And you know what?  If your killer has a thing for Shakespeare, and you’re female, and he calls you Lavinia?  If you’ve read Titus, then you’ll be quaking in your boots because you know exactly what that implies.  But if you haven’t read Titus, you have no idea.  So the author (via the killer) lays it out for you, leaving a piece of the Titus script at the scene, with the important stage direction underlined (I won’t spoil it).  I’m cool with that.  Titus isn’t the most well known play, and it’s not like she spends pages explaining who Hamlet is.

But later the narrator needs some knowledge of Cardenio, the holy grail of Shakespeare’s lost plays.  And it’s disappointing how little she has.  She does not make the connection when she spots Cervantes among her clues.  She knows of the existence of The Double Falsehood, but then makes herself a note to look it up on the net because she’s unfamiliar with it.  I mean, come on, I’ve read the silly thing.  And she’s completely surprised at a reference to Theobald’s three copies of the original, even though it’s the sort of thing that makes it to the first paragraph of any story on the subject.  So here’s an instance where the casual reader certainly needs a bit of a boost in the facts department, but I found it a little unbelievable that the narrator did not have that sort of knowledge about such an important subject. <shrug>

Having said that, I’m still enough of a Shakespeare geek that I’ll take all the references I can get.  When one character turns to the narrator and says “Sleep now,” or something like that, my brain immediately jumped to both “Sleep no more, Macbeth hath murdered sleep!” and “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub” and I was wondering which quote the narrator would come back with.  And I get these cool shivers down my spine early in the book when they are actually acting out a bit of the play.  I just love it when somebody delivers that first quote, it’s like the start of something beautiful every time.

So, to sum up, I’m tolerating the thriller bits to get to the Shakespeare bits, and hoping that she doesn’t dumb down those parts so much that I can’t take it anymore.   This is where DaVinci Code had the advantage, because I did not have the same knowledge of the background material that I do here, and I could spend more time saying “Oh, that’s interesting, didn’t know that.”  With this book I’m sure to spend much more time saying things like “Yes yes, we knew that, get on with it!” Sorry if that was a lame review, but I’m not one to shove my opinions on other people.  I say what I like and why I like it.  Right now I’m not reading it to figure out the mystery, I’m reading it for the Shakespeare bits.  And enjoying it very much.