A
Novel by T. M. Doran
I
have a fondness for novels featuring historical characters
experiencing fantastic but fictional adventures. By this I mean not “historical novels” retelling historical events in
the form of a novel, where the author strives to adhere as closely as
possible to events as they actually happened while necessarily supplying dialogue, minor incidents, and even peripheral characters
as necessary to create a dramatic narrative out of the facts as we
know them (examples abound, but springing first to mind are Colleen
McCullough's Masters
of Rome
series), or even fundamentally fictional stories featuring a
fictional character set firmly within a historical context and
events, interacting with historical persons (e.g., Max Allan Collins'
Nathan
Heller Mysteries
[LINK]).
No, I mean something more akin to Paul Malmont's novels, The
Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
and The
Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown
[LINK],
the former placing the 1930s writers of hero pulps in their own
hair-raisingly pulpish adventures complete with reanimated corpses
and the Yellow Peril, the latter similarly focusing on the 1940s
pioneers of science fiction in a fantastic war-time plot to recover a
Death Ray defense against the Axis. In fact, as I write this I
realize that those latter two novels exemplify what I really find
compelling, imagining the writers
of fantastic
fiction
plunged into the midst of their own fantastic
adventures.
A
couple of months ago, I read (and reviewed) No
Dawn For Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nazi
Germany
[LINK].
My assessment of it was somewhat mixed, both because of a rather
pedestrian writing style that did not successfully emulate that of
either author and because it did not succeed in imparting a necessary
suspension of disbelief that these could indeed be “the real story”
behind the authors and the creation of the the literary monuments for
which they are known. Neither of those criticisms apply to this
book, however, which was recommended to me by our parish priest, with
whom I share a love for all things Tolkien, around the same time I
had heard of and already ordered No
Dawn For Men.
The intriguing prospect of a mash-up of Tolkien and Fleming in a spy
adventure on the eve of World War II had me read that book first,
inadvertently saving the better for later. If No
Dawn For Men
is a simple pot-boiler thriller, Toward
the Gleam
rises to the level of literature – while remaining an edge-of-your
seat thriller. Which is no mean accomplishment given how much
discourse and dialogue is contained in these pages, working in a
great deal of the changing philosophy and world-view of the early
twentieth century. That latter feature, as well as the characters
and literary connections posited, make it obvious why Ignatius Press,
a relatively small Catholic publishing house specializing in orthodox
theology and philosophy as well as fiction picked up this book
[LINK]. (As with many other
of its books, Ignatius' page for this book [LINK]
site hosts a reading guide [LINK]
as well as a great embedded Youtube “book trailer” [LINK].)
Before
I get to a more spoiler-filled discussion of some particular elements
of this book that struck me as noteworthy, here's a general overview
of the plot: A
young English scholar, recuperating from injuries suffered on the
front-lines of the World War I, discovers a mysterious box containing
an ancient manuscript bound in red, written in an unknown language.
His linguistics training allows him to laboriously decipher over a
decade and a half or so the lost tales of a long-departed age – but
his obsessive quest to understand the historical context whence came
the book brings him to the attention of a great enemy who demands the
knowledge contained within the book for himself, toward the end of
world domination. Much of this tale is a tense cat-and-mouse game in
which we experience along with the scholar the dread of an
approaching doom that seems almost a force of nature, tempered with
the support of a close fellowship of academic colleagues as well as a
loving family and clear-headed, eminently practical and down-to-earth
wife, climaxing in a one-on-one confrontation within the hallowed
halls of Oxford University itself.
The
rest of this review contains spoilers which, while not giving away
the overall story itself beyond the brief summary above, may well
ruin a lot of the reading experience; if you've not yet read the book
for yourself, I would suggest you do so before
going any further....
