Review of "The Philosopher's Stone"

If "The Philosopher's Stone" (1969) was a car, it would have a great big weld down the middle where author Colin Wilson had attached the (frankly rather turgid) H.G.Wells-style front end to the (actually reasonably OK) H.P.Lovecraft-style back end. It makes me wants to shout in his face: Oi, Wilson, No - the beginning is usually the wrong place to start your story.

Really, he should have dropped all his faux logical positivism guff (drearily moving the main character forward one atom at a time) and instead started from about page 190. Then, just three pages from the end, when the main character's mind is temporarily merged [a bit Mr Spock-y, but what the hey] with the mad God-like uber-priest K'tholo, Wilson could easily have punted the story off into an even higher state of Lovecraft emulation (but moved forward to the present day)... now that would have been a nice slice of occult horror to read. But he didn't. :-(

Including the Voynich Manuscript is a nice piece of intellectual decoupage on Wilson's part, but feels a bit like collateral damage from his high-speed drive-by scattershot blasts at culture, philosophy and history - Bruckner, Merleau-Ponty, George Bernard Shaw, Plato, de Maupassant, the Popol Vuh, etc - which fill most of the book.

Still, if you fancy reading a Lovecraftian short story disguised as a novel, you shouldn't be too disappointed. *sigh*

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.

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!