The Book of Fate: The Mystery of the Missing Masonry

The Book of Fate
Brad Meltzer
Grand Central Publishing, 2006


Have you ever gotten a few chapters into a book, put it down, picked it up again, finished it, and then wished you'd simply trusted your initial instinct instead of wasting that time? That describes my experience with this book to a "t." The Book of Fate has nothing to do with Freemasonry, in spite of what the front cover, back cover blurb, and author's note would all have you believe. The conspicuous Masonic compasses and square in the book's title serve only to fool the reader into thinking this is another Da Vinci Code or National Treasure.

In fact, it is a cockamamie political thriller whose cast of characters is almost as unbelievable as its byzantine plotting. There's President Leland Manning, who follows W in office; his wife, Dr. Lenore Manning; his aide, sometimes narrator Wes Holloway, who was shot by a ricochet during an assassination attempt leaving his face permanently scarred; the President's best friend Boyle, who was shot and killed during the same assassination attempt, only to turn up very alive eight years later; Wes' roommate Rogo, a traffic ticket attorney and devoted friend; Lisbeth Dodson, the gossip columnist who wants to be the next Woodward and Bernstein; and Nico Hadrian, a religious psychotic responsible for "assassinating Boyle" under the influence of a mysterious cabal called The Three.

Lest you suspect that "The Three" are Freemasons, thus explaining the cover and Masonic hoopla, you'd be wrong. Rather they are three top agents from the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service, who have been in cahoots to scam the government with expensive, phony intelligence. Somehow they connect to the assassination of Boyle, which was perpetrated by Nico because the Three easily convinced him that his father was (1) evil, (2) his mom's murderer, (3) a Freemason, and (4) conspiring with other Freemasons, such as the man he is to assassinate, Boyle. Nico's late father was, apparently, a Freemason (indicated by the secret tatoo of compass and squares on his ankle). But Boyle isn't a Freemason. The President isn't a Freemason. None of the Three are Freemasons. The plot doesn't revolve around a big Masonic secret. Instead Freemasonry was simply something that the Three associated (wrongly) with Nico's father and with Boyle in order to get Nico to pull the trigger for them. Make sense? No. Then you're following along nicely.

For the record, the book didn't totally suck. It was fun enough for an airplane or the beach, although the execrable plotting might induce headaches after one too many mojitos. Just don't expect it to make much sense and especially don't expect it to have anything to do with Freemasonry and you probably won't be too disappointed. How is that for damning with faint praise?

Whores for Gloria: "Whores and undertakers are the only eternal optimists."

Whores for Gloria
William T. Vollmann
Pantheon Books, 1991


Difficult to read, impossible to put down.

That it came highly recommended by my good friend Michael "Berkeley Mike" McCamish, Ph.D. surprised me a little; after all, he's the same dude who recommended Mr. God, This is Anna a few years back, and that book is almost diametrically opposed to this one. I knew in the first few pages what about this novel had so gripped Mike, though, because I too felt its pull. Although I never lived in the Tenderloin or worked with the many homeless in San Francisco's Mission district like Mike did, I still experienced enough of that side of "the City" back in my years as a grad school poseur.

Whores for Gloria is sleek and obsidian, lit up like the marquee on the O'Farrell Theatre, gritty like the residue that flows down the gutter on Larkin, covered with bits of blackened bubble gum and the tang of stale urine. Its prose illuminates the sublime within a painful, despairing, unsparing reality--the street life of the homeless, whores, and junkies of the City by the Bay. This is shock value with substance, the darkest side of urban life--the ugly, the downtrodden, the "murdered whores with their cunts removed," the raped, the abused, the discarded. Vollmann's evocative prose and spare settings demand that the reader pick up the rhythm or get left behind. The story flows like a sewer (rather than a "stream") of consciousness, and even when the action takes place "outside" a character's head, it catches the flow of the streets, the lack of self-consciousness perhaps indicated by the consistent lack of quotation marks. Vollmann is definitely not a writer for those to whom the whole world must be "cutey all the time."

An aged blonde clopped by like a horse as she inhaled on her cigarette, and her face was lined with grief. --Laredo shifted her aching feet, wishing that the night would end although she was well aware that by the laws of astronomy the night would not end till morning; neither, it seemed, would the drunk on the pay phone. (p. 3)

The novel begins with Laredo, an undercover cop, watching Jimmy, one of the city's homeless thousands, laughing/crying into a pay phone.

The man laughed. He hung up. He winked at Laredo and sauntered off whistling. But Laredo was no fool. She knew that the pay phone had been broken for weeks. And she knew that the man was still crying. (p. 7)

Jimmy, a down-and-out Vietnam vet and full-time wino, pursues the mysterious "Gloria" (whose name made me think of the Christmas carol refrain, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo"). His regular visits to the streetwalkers, which vacillate between businesslike and brutal, are all carried out in her name.

The truth is that Jimmy tried never to stop thinking of Gloria. Even when he bent women over as they spread the cheeks of their buttocks apart so that he could fuck them up their assholes which bulged like the ends of sausage-casings, he was thinking of Gloria. (p. 18)

Jimmy begins to collect stories from his lady friends and seems intent on using these stories to "recreate" Gloria. One begins to suspect that perhaps Gloria is merely a figment of Jimmy's fevered imagination, rather than being a lover lost to whatever lament has brought Jimmy to this sorry state.

Jimmy was smiling; he was leaning back against a column of washing machines, fingering Melissa's memories as though they were breasts, the softness and succulence of them; he could twist them into different shapes as he sucked on them; he kissed their round pink areolae of sadness and tried not to mind them; he squeezed them and their nipples budded. (pp. 27-28)

Vollmann tears through the veil between the reader's perfect world and the unimaginable pain and desperation--that is still somehow also just everyday life--of those wandering through a fog of opiates, delirium, or shell shock.

Shit, he sighed. Every last one of us betrayed by the VC. Jimmy brainwashed, the Wrecking Crew all dropped dead, Riley God knows where, and me left to fend for myself here in the middle of motherfucking Hanoi, USA. Nothing to do, nothing to do. Wanna kill those Chinese Charlies! Come out and fight! he shouted.

Nobody came.

Guess I won that one, said Code Six, and he lay down on the sidewalk and went to sleep... (p. 124)

In the end we discover (or do we, given the tenuous grasp that so many of these wretches have on what we call "reality"?) that Gloria is real. And that Jimmy is no longer.

I turn around, man, and here comes Jimmy with his whore chasin' him! Usually were the other way around, weren't it? Damn! And she drilled his motherfuckin' ass, good and proper. Oh, man! --Code Six chuckled until poor Riley thought he must dissolve under the stench. -- Jimmy comes in, the bitch comes in, just lit him up, right there! And she killed him dead right in front of the whole goddamned restaurant, and there were about twenty people in there, cooks and all--right bare-ass from my eyes! I said, motherfucker, I was safer back in Nippon, man, 'cause at least that way I know where the field of fire is! And that was how Jimmy died. Died like a hero. I never did find out what he had done. But you might 'a' knowed his ass, man. And might 'a' knowed her! It was old Gloria! (p. 138)

As noted above, in spite of its incredibly dark, painful, and brutal subject matter, Vollmann's language and storytelling fill the entire book with a dark radiance that is redemptive if not hopeful. It turns out that, according to an interview with Vollmann, that there is a reason for this. He feels that prostitutes are very spiritual people, who give of themselves to save marriages and to provide comfort to the loneliest, most desperate among us. He noted that, at the same time they fill these essential needs prostitutes also spread disease and often rob their clients. If the ability to hold in one's mind two contradictory thoughts at one time defines genius, then Vollmann's novel certainly qualifies.

Thanks for the recommendation Mike!

Straight Man: "For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it's always wrong."

Straight Man
Richard Russo
Vintage Books, 1997

Russo's gaspingly funny Straight Man affords a knowing look at midlife crisis, parent-child dynamics, marriage, and tenured life in small-town academia. The novel's humor is leavened with mystery regarding various political machinations on the narrator's campus, including which of his colleagues (or is it the narrator himself?) is to be thrown under the bus. That narrator, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., known to his friends and enemies alike as Hank, is an anarchist by nature who finds himself in the unenviable position of chairman of his English department. Along with the typical struggles of academic life (I've heard it said that "never have the stakes been so low"), Hank is plagued with worries. He is concerned that he might have kidney stones (an ailment that plagued his highly successful novelist-academic father, a father who abandoned Hank and his mother when Hank was still a kid); he wants to sleep with several of the women with whom he works (including his secretary who ends every sentence with an upwards inflection, as if she is permanently uncertain about everything); and he is haunted by the fact that he wrote his only novel as a young man and has contributed nothing subsequently to American letters.

Needless to say the book is a very funny read. At one point the reader finds the narrator hiding in the ceiling whilst spying on the meeting which decides on his status as department chair. On another occasion and completely on the spur of the moment, Hank threatens (on live television, no less) to kill a duck (or is it a goose?) unless the state legislature and university administration resolve the school's funding situation. The cast of characters will be all-too-familiar to anyone fortunate (or is that unfortunate?) enough to work in academe. It includes the violent poet whose poetry isn't all that great, the aforementioned uncertain secretary?, and the young professor ("Orshee") whose sole academic specialty seems to be contradicting everyone else (a good obstructionist/deconstructionist, if nothing else) while posing as an uber-feminist at every opportunity.

Throughout the novel Hank repeatedly returns to his favorite philosopher, the medieval William of Occam (after whom his dog Occam is named), to find the simplest possible explanation for all the craziness that seems to be filling his life. Through the novel's wry twists and turns, Hank comes to the conclusion that life is a little more complicated, coincidental, mysterious, and perhaps even magical than he'd like to believe.

Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstances, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who." (373-4)

A special thanks goes out to Bruce Clark, who recommended that I read this book over the Christmas break, and to his lovely wife Caryn Clark, whose copy I borrowed and devoured.

Works as both thriller and alternate history

Fatherland
Robert Harris
HarperTorch, 1993

What if Nazi Germany had won the European war? What would the world of the 1960s look like with an aging Führer still clutching the reigns of power? Those are the big questions that inform journalist and author Robert Harris' debut novel, a genuine page-turner about one German policeman's investigation of a routine corpse who turns out to be anything but routine.

I really enjoyed this novel on many levels. For one thing, it is a compelling thriller involving long-buried secrets, political assassinations, international intrigue, and Gestapo tactics and police state paranoia. The main protagonist, Sturmbahnnführer Xavier March, a surprisingly sympathetic SS officer-by-default whose loyalty to the Reich is far from perfect, finds himself drawn into a web of treachery involving a 20-year old secret that unknown parties will kill to protect.

Fatherland is also ingeniously crafted alternate history, in which Albert Speer's larger-than-life architectural visions for Nazi Berlin have been brought to fruition. Descriptions of the titanic Arch of Triumph (40 or so times bigger than the Parisian monument of the same name) and the thousand-foot tall Great Hall vied for my attention against chilling details about everyday life in a racist police state. And of course, there is that decades-old secret March unravels; it has something to do with obscure frontier towns called Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Dachau.

All in all, a well written debut novel that is well worth a read.

(This review was originally written on September 14, 2007.)

2 stars = 3 stars for exploring interesting ideas; 1 star for writing a really bad novel

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Daniel Quinn
Bantam, 1995

I've been trying to encapsulate all my feelings about this book, and I have concluded that it is basically a written version of the film Mindwalk.

Let me explain. (And please don't comment that the written version of Mindwalk, or more accurately the book upon which the film was based, was Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point--I know that already. I'm speaking metaphorically.) While the ideas discussed in that film were oftentimes incredibly fascinating and very urgent, the film itself, as a film, sorta sucked. Not an idea picture you want to make most folks sit through more than once, if that, in other words. So it is with this book. The ideas that it explores, sort of like deep ecology for beginners, certainly put it in the 3-star ("good") category. As a novel, though, it just isn't that good. The two characters in the book are merely mouthpieces for the pseudo-dialogues comprising the bulk of the book, and one of the two, the narrator, isn't much of a mouthpiece at that. It is not a surprise to me that many publishers passed on this novel.

The story, such as it is, begins intriguingly enough with a classified ad advertising a teacher for those who earnestly want to save the world. Our narrator, being an earnest, spiritual "seeker"-type, applies in person, only to discover that the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who can communicate telepathically--not exactly what we expect of a guru! The two enter into a series of pseudo-dialogues that go on for the majority of the book's 250+ pages and which are interspersed with a few rather pedestrian interludes whose sole purpose seems to be to make this book a work of fiction, rather than a series of nonfiction lectures.

Many reviewers have asserted that these dialogues echo a powerful and respected format used by philosophers from Plato to Hume, but I disagree; instead of being authentic dialogues, in which every position is examined from many angles and by many voices, what appear in this novel are frustrated (and frustrating) lectures on the part of an overbearing, know-it-all silverback. They reminded me of high school lectures by a bad teacher who asks overly general questions and then snaps at the students for not immediately intuiting the expected answer. In addition, because these aren't authentic dialogues, Ishmael basically outlines his thesis without any critical feedback or counter-theses from the narrator, and so the reader is left accepting or rejecting the gorilla's expositions on intuition.

So much for the book's failings. Its success is in its ability to articulate clearly both a deep ecological critique of "civilization" (i.e., the worldview that has come to dominate the globe since the Agricultural Revolution began) and a vision of an alternative cultural paradigm within which humans can live harmoniously with the rest of the world. Using the terms "Takers" and "Leavers" (derived from the phrase "take it or leave it") to describe the two general types of human culture, Ishmael explores a subject with which he, as a gorilla, is quite familiar: captivity. Takers, who now make up the majority of the human species, are captives to their culture, which Ishmael defines as the story that they enact every day. For Takers, this story "casts mankind as the enemy of the world" (p. 75) and makes absolute mastery over the planet (nay, the universe!) the overarching cultural imperative. Human uniqueness and dominion over creation is "the manifesto of the [agricultural] revolution on which your culture is based. It's the repository of all your revolutionary doctrine and the definitive expression of your revolutionary spirit. It explains why the revolution was necessary and why it must be carried forward at any cost whatever" (154). Ishmael's description of the barrenness of the Takers' inner landscape rings true to those who see the consumption and control don't bring happiness: "The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness" (146). Those who find the works of Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen, (among others) compelling will nod their heads in agreement with much of what Quinn, and Ishmael, have to say about "Taker" culture.

"Leaver" cultures, which Ishmael roughly equates with "primitive" or "indigenous" cultures, are those who engage in "limited competition" (which complements Piotr Kropotkin's idea of "mutual aid"). This means that they do not exterminate their competitors and they don't deny their competitors access to food, so that biological (and cultural) communities maintain a healthy diversity and sustainability. Ishmael's challenge to the narrator, and to the reader, is to find a way to infuse the Leaver mindset (i.e., the intuition that there is no one right way, no need to have total control, and no way that we can continue to determine who lives and who dies) into our 21st century civilization.

(This review was originally written on June 25, 2007.)

Works as a ghost story and a travel novel, albeit one with a scant plot

The Daemon in Our Dreams
John F. Rooney
Senneff House Publishers, 2007

Opening with the cold-blooded assassination of three people in a London hotel bar by a clean-shaven Indian man, the novel outlines the prequel to this seemingly senseless triple killing. Three travelers, strangers connected only by a shared Asian itinerary, have each begun to have eerie, frightening dreams involving a clean-shaven Indian man. As it becomes apparent to each of these individuals that the others are also haunted by the same man, each begins to see the figure from their dreams manifest in broad daylight. As they make their way from one port of call to another, this man, whom they have come to call "Ramesh," is somehow able to keep pace with them. His appearances grow stranger and more frightening, and the mounting fears of those being haunted begin to wear on their traveling companions. Of course, it is not a spoiler to acknowledge that this "daemon," this Ramesh, is in fact the same clean-shaven Indian assassin who guns them down in the beginning and at the end of the novel. And in the end, I was still just as clueless in regard to why he did it as I was in the first chapter.

That is probably the books biggest drawback. Other reviewers have noted it, and I can only concur: the novel's plot is not what it could be, given such an interesting premise. This is not to say that the book is a loss. On the contrary, the novel succeeds in two ways. The book works as an updated 19th-century ghost story, with successive manifestations of the apparition (and the concomitant suggestion that those being visited are just going mad) serving to slowly build an atmosphere of creepiness. The novel is also successful travel fiction, with humorous dialogues interspersed with knowing descriptions of different sites in South and Souteast Asia. Reading the book really brought back memories of traveling in Bhutan and Thailand.

I wouldn't normally have read this book, because ghost stories and travel novels aren't usually on my reading list. Having done so at the request of the author, I am glad I did. Although the plot could have been more fully fleshed out (along with the motivations of the ghostly assassin), the author showed a talent for writing engaging and creepy material, and this book definitely held my attention for most of its 285 pages.

(This review was originally written on May 1, 2007.)

Staggeringly mediocre----why has this sold 1 copy for every 100 people on Earth?

The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
Doubleday, 2003

Amazon reviewer Steven Reynolds summed it up nicely, but since I write these reviews primarily for my own benefit, I can't rely on his words to describe my experience.

So here are my words: a gruesome murder and its symbolic aftermath; a rock star of a Harvard symbologist who can't recognize the Star of David as two intersecting triangles; two-page chapters flying past, with every other chapter returning to our hero the rock star symbologist; 450 pages in two sessions of roughly 3 hours each; character development, what character development?; albino assassin working for Catholic conspirators, Priory of Sion conspirators, Templar conspirators; the Holy Grail; Mary Magadalene and Jesus; the exact same double-bluff tricks from Angels and Demons with bad guys as good guys as bad guys; and it all ends in such an unsatisfying way.

Perhaps I would be willing to give Dan Brown a free pass on this if this novel weren't so darned successful. I don't resent the success per se. Instead I despise the fact that this author has managed to stir up so much controversy (and so many revenues) without actually understanding the material he's writing about. For a novel that purports to be an intellectual tour de force, this book is filled with errors even a college freshman with Wikipedia could catch. (Example: Brown actually has a character assert that the name "YHWH" derives from the name "Jehovah," when in fact the reverse is the case.) Every time "Harrison Ford in tweed" discussed the mysterious organizations, themes, and locales that run throughout the book---whether Saint-Sulpice, Rosslyn Chapel, the Priory of Sion, etc.---my mind would scream out for someone on Langdon's dissertation commitee to call and revoke his degree. The Priory of Sion was exposed as a 20th century hoax, yet Brown insists on telling readers in his introductory "fact" note that this demonstrated forgery was a secret society founded in 1099. His characters, allegedly renowned scholars no less, recite their conspiracy theories like stoned undergraduates at a late night party shocking one another with earnestly repeated urban legends. After a while, the college stoner conspiracy crap lost its charm, and by the time the end of the book was approaching, I realized that the author had already shot his main goods in the chapter on Jesus and Mary Magdalene as lovers. THAT was the controversy that made this book sell. THAT was the real secret of the book, and not the farcical Grail that Langdon pursues until the very last page. Revealing to a world of Christians that their religion was bound up in the vagaries and contingencies of history, and that there are aspects to this religion that have been lost or hidden, made for controversy and good sales.

This could have been a much better book, even a great book, in the hands of a real writer and researcher. As it is, The Da Vinci Code is merely the scandalously popular and criminally overrated work of a mediocre, hamfisted hack.

(This review was originally written on March 13, 2007.)

The Milagro Beanfield War: A delightful read about the day a man began irrigating his father's beanfield

The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel
John Nichols
Owl Books, 2000

I finally got around to reading this novel whilst on summer vacation (it was in the free pile at the condo) and am so glad that I did.

Nichols engages the reader from the first page, with a blend of magical realism, social commentary, satire, and good old fashioned story telling.

Jose "Joe" Mandragon sets in motion a variety of forces in the state of New Mexico when he irrigates his family legacy, a miniscule beanfield left to him by his father. With that simple act, centuries-old tensions between rancher and farmer, Mexican and Anglo, subsistence living and the cash economy, come to a head.

What could have been a dull exercise in race relations, regional history, and economic theory, is instead brought to wonderful, earthy life in this charming novel that will make you think, laugh, and perhaps even shed a tear or two.

Definitely worth reading!

(This review was originally written on June 14, 2006.)