Voynich News gets noticed *sigh*...

Note: this article has now moved to voynich-news-gets-noticed-sigh on Cipher Mysteries

It shouldn't really be news, but journalism lecturer Max McCoy (author of the "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone" novel) dropped a link to my review into his blog, calling (and then apologizing for having called) Voynich News "geeky". Gee, how should I retaliate? Perhaps I'll have to call him "cheeky" for quoting 75% of my review in his posting, but then apologize for doing so. :-p

Regardless, it's nice to get a response: blogging can be somewhat dispiriting, mainly from the resounding lack of feedback (this blog gets about 1 comment for every 10 posts, which is perhaps a little bit low). Publishers are more interested in the Times Literary Supplement and/or Richard & Judy, and rarely send bloggers review copies; journalists hate bloggers (basically, for undercutting them); academics seem wary of bloggers to the point of enforced mutism; while bloggers are mainly courted by other bloggers working on their PageRank.

Or maybe people are a bit scared of me, because I take in so many different types of stuff and try to make sense of them all as a whole, in an era when people enjoy the cubicle comfort of specialized knowledge.

Or perhaps I produce closed readings which people are not interested enough in to feel the urge to pass any comment on?

Or might I be the only person that finds this stuff interesting?

Voynich-related novel reviews...

In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into.

In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based Macguffin, a time capsule mechanically carrying [powerful / occult / heretical] ideas forward from the [insert bygone era name here] to satisfy the present-tense needs of the plot. Plenty of old-fashioned writers continue to hammer out such formulaic Victorian penny-dreadful tat even now: what kind of barrier could ever hold back such a tide?

Thankfully, contemporary writers have begun to engage with other ideas in the cloud of ideas surrounding the VMs. Though I personally don't think it will turn out to be delusional nonsense, channelled writing, off-world DNA-creation technology, or even a deliberate hoax, I think these are interesting angles far more worthy of being explored in fiction.

With this in mind, here's a list of the novel reviews on my site:-

(1) It's brutally old-fashioned, but Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone [review] by Max McCoy presses all the right buttons. It knows it's a piece of junk but simply doesn't care: it's having too much fun. Recommended!

(2) I had high hopes for "PopCo" [review] by Scarlett Thomas, but it just ended up like a creative writing collage. If you can cope with the crypto-geeky Gen-X No-Logo buzzwordiness of the whole concept, you'll probably enjoy it: but for me it fails to work on most levels.

(3) Rather than engage with the VMs directly, "Vellum" [review] by Matt Rubinstein creates an Australian doppelganger of it, and has a lot of fun exploring a would-be decipherer's descent into madness and/or confusion. Recommended!

(4) "Enoch's Portal" [review] by A.W.Hill boils up a heady stew of alchemy, cultishness and quantum pretension, where Leo Levitov's Cathar hypothesis about the Voynich Manuscript is merely one of many spices sloshed into the mixing bowl. No Michelin stars, sorry.

Review of "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone"...

No, not the 2008 film (though that too has a crystal skull-based storyline): I'm talking about the 1995 book by Max McCoy, which Bantam have just (May 2008) reissued apropos of nothing (apart from perhaps trying to surf the wave of the film's gigantic marketing spend?)

The Voynich Manuscript makes its appearance very early on (p.27, actually the first page of Chapter 1): McCoy manages to present its history very lightly and not bog the reader down in too many details. But as the book is set in 1933, there wasn't a whole UFO angle to cover (or other such modern confections). Instead, you get a little bit of Newbold, Bacon, alchemy, Major John M. Manly (!!!), John Dee, Kelly, the Shew Stone, and even a quick reference to Wilfrid Voynich in New York: basically, everything moves briskly along in the kind of proper screenplay-like way you'd hope from an Indy novel. Yes, there's even the occasional snake (for readers playing Indy buzzword bingo, I guess).

I'll admit it: I was charmed by the book. It's small (293 pocket-size pages), no larger than you'd imagine a Japanese commuter squeezing into a pocket, and reads so quickly that at some points (most notably in the end sequence past the oasis) I deliberately closed my eyes to slow the pace down so that I could properly picture the scene in my mind.

Historically, the book has a deliciously light touch throughout, in particular when Indy and his companion are improbably rescued by an elderly French couple called Nicholas and Peronelle (p.200) - and if you can't work out who they are by that stage in the story, you very possibly deserve to be shot.

I liked all the atlantici history and the Shelta Thari stuff (there's a Wikipedia page too) woven in: but note that when McCoy writes "Nus a dhabjan dhuilsa", he probably means "Nus a dhabjon dhuilsha" ['The blessing of God on you'], though I'd prefer not to pick a fight with a tinker / tinsmith as to which one is correct. Incidentally, my guess is that McCoy picked up the reference to Thari from Roger Zelazny's 10-book 'Amber' series.

Inevitably, there are some historical mistakes in the book (the VMs wasn't in Yale in 1933, I'm pretty sure that the British Museum had a positive rotograph of at least some of the VMs in 1929, etc), but frankly I couldn't care less. It's a delightful, frothy, whip-cracking romp through alchemical history, that I think should be required reading for any modern Voynich novelist.

Voynich Manuscript in existing novels...?

From the apparent tsunami of Voynich fiction about to crash down on our literary shores over the next year, it might seem that the VMs had never previously appeared in a novel. Yet this is not exactly true...

For example, "Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone" (Max McCoy, Bantam Books, 1995) is based entirely around the Voynich Manuscript: set in March 1933, a mad scholar called Sarducci has stolen the VMs (which is actually a map), and so Indy chases him through Mussolini's fascist Italy all the way to an amazing alchemical crypt in the desert... From what I've read of this book, it actually seems to be a pleasantly pulpy read, very much in tune with the actual VMs, and with a refreshing lack of power-mad Jesuit priests. However, I should warn you that it will be re-released on 29th April 2008, presumably to try to ride the whole 2008 Voy-niche publishing wave. *sigh*

Another pair of VMs-themed books came to my attention via the Bellairsia blog, which is devoted to books by the writer John Anthony Bellairs. His most famous novel was "The Face in the Frost" (1969), a fantasy novel in which Prospero and Roger Bacon fight against a mysterious grimoire that sounds not at all dissimilar to the VMs. After Bellairs' death in 1991, his estate commissioned author Brad Strickland to complete and continue Bellairs' various series: and it is in one of these that protagonist Johnny Dixon faces "The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost" (1999), which features the VMs in a starring role.

Connections between J.R.R.Tolkien and the VMs have been suggested in the past. According to Voynich mailing list member Anthony, Tolkien did indeed own a copy of at least one page of the VMs, which may have played a small part in influencing his choice of the fantasy scripts in his books. As I recall, there were a number of people in Tolkien's Oxford circle that had an interest in early modern scientific manuscripts, so this does seem a perfectly sensible idea.

Many people have also wondered about the relationship between H.P.Lovecraft's Necronomicon and the Voynich Manuscript: Colin Wilson based a short story called "The Return of the Lloigor" around this, and returned to the theme at the end of his novel "The Philosopher's Stone".

All the same, this modest pile of Voynich fiction looks set to triple in height this year... interesting times!