A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

June 15, 2020
Boyne (A Ladder to The Sky) traces a quest for revenge across centuries in this inventive, engrossing novel. Spanning from Palestine in 1 CE to outer space in 2080, the narrative advances through each chapter with the characters renamed and living in a different location and time. The unnamed narrator disappoints his warrior father by becoming an artisan, fashioning sandals in fifth-century Guatemala and amulets in seventh-century Greenland. He loses his first wife on their wedding day to a natural disaster. His second marriage ends in his wife’s death when his cousin spitefully exposes her location to her own vengeful family after the narrator refuses to keep the cousin’s lover on as an apprentice. Full of rage, the narrator feigns muteness and enters a monastery, helping to illuminate the Book of Kells. As he plots revenge against his cousin, he begins sleeping with an ambitious female ruler (alternately Lady Macbeth, a Dutch queen, and a Chinese empress, all of whom keep him in their clutches). He commits a terrible act to escape the empress, which primes him for further tragedies. The conceit of shifting settings (with cameos from Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Ned Kelly, and other famous figures) is handled seamlessly, and the action never ceases. Fans of imaginative historical fiction and tragic epics will enjoy this quirky, lyrical novel. Agent: Eric Simonff, WME.

July 1, 2020
This challenging, time-traveling epic looks at a family's travails in different eras and locales around the world. With his 12th novel for adults, Irish writer Boyne tracks one family, more or less, through two millennia and over much of the globe. Gird your loins: This is busy and potentially confusing stuff, teeming with treachery, flaying, famous figures, and "the marriage act." As the book begins, in Palestine, 1 C.E., the unnamed male narrator's father, a Roman soldier, heads off to slaughter innocents at Herod's behest. Chapter 2's segue suggests the same narrative, but the family members have different names and live in Turkey, 41 C.E. So it will go, for 50 chapters, as the family members and their crises slowly evolve in ever new settings enriched by historical details and cameos from Attila, Michelangelo, and Lady Macbeth, inter alia. It's a kind of mashup of the History Channel and soap operas, with the cast facing enslavement, rape, gay bashing, murder, natural disasters, a missing brother, and lost wives. The narrator, along with an artistic bent, has a nasty side, and the latter part of the book will be dominated by his drive for vengeance against a crippled cousin. With Chapter 51, the final crisis arrives in the U.S. on election night 2016. Boyne is a gifted storyteller, but the language here can be stilted, sometimes comically so: "the unexpected engorgement beneath my tunic." His theme, with all its variations and repetition, boils down to plus ca change: "[T]he things that surround us may change, but our emotions will always remain the same." Yet an epilogue set in the near future suggests what it might take to get us off our hamster wheel. An intriguing work whose ambition and richness should, for many readers, overcome some flaws.

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August 7, 2020

Beginning with the Massacre of the Innocents in the first year of the Common Era and concluding in the year 2080, a singular voice narrates the biography of its soul through time and across the globe. Over the course of 2,000 years, this voice recounts episodes that take place in every country on Earth linked by shared details, such as family dynamics and conflicts from one time and place to the next. So the familial tensions and pivotal events of a life lived in 10th-century Iceland recur with nuanced and significant changes in Mozambique in the year 1000; a mother's warning in sixth-century Yemen comes to pass in eighth-century Egypt; and the mother who had loved and encouraged the son who narrates each vignette passes away in Mexico in the year 752. As multiple story arcs resolve and emerge in different times and places, the voice remains mostly consistent throughout, lending the tale continuity and cohesion. Also continuous is the violence and cruelty of patriarchy and the idea that beauty, creatively manifested in craft and art, has always been an antidote for these evils. VERDICT Boyne's (A Ladder to the Sky) latest novel ingeniously interrogates the historical and cultural roots of our present age--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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