Review of "The Dumas Club"...

Note: this article has now moved to review-of-the-dumas-club on Cipher Mysteries

If (like me) you enjoyed Roman Polanski's film "The Ninth Gate" (I happened to see it in a hotel room in New Haven, giving it a particular resonance for me) which I mentioned recently, you might think about reading the novel from which it sprang, Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Dumas Club".

Its main protagonist, Lucas Corso, gets described early on as a "book detective": but he is closer to the romantic archetype of a charmingly ruthless European antiquarian book-hunter for which Wilfrid Voynich and Hans Kraus both felt nostalgic. Whenever short-sighted, boyish-looking Corso takes off his glasses and puts on his "innocent rabbit" face, everyone seems to give him what he wants: perhaps Wilfrid Voynich used much the same kind of trick, who knows?

But it's not simply a cherchez-la-livre romance: there are two stories intertwined, one concerning various Spanish book-dealers' passions for Alexander Dumas' pulpy (but vastly popular) bestsellers such as "The Three Musketeers"; and the other about the three remaining copies of a mysterious 17th century printed book for summoning the Devil, written in heavily abbreviated/coded Latin and with nine Tarot-like drawings, and whose printer (Aristide Torchia) was supposedly burned at the stake for creating it.

Structurally, this reminds me a lot of the TV show "CSI" (the proper Las Vegas one), which typically fills its hour-long slot by telling two forensic detective stories (each roughly half-hour long), and leaving it as a point of suspense whether the two strands are connected or not. Lucas Corso struggles gamely to see the link, but ultimately none materialises in the way that he expects. Despite the reader's (and Corso's) sense of a buzzing conspiratorial coherency in the early few chapters, the book actually ends up more like two intertwined extended short stories (one horror, one literary) than a single majestic novel, which is a shame.

For the film adaptation, Polanski simply ditched the whole Dumas connection, and instead concentrated on the "Book of Nine Gates" half of the book - essentially, whereas he optioned "The Dumas Club", he actually filmed "The Non-Dumas Club".

Yet the first hundred pages are simply brilliant, inspiring, edgy, like peering anxiously through Montecristo cigar fug to make out the looming shape of an unknown menace. But then Perez-Reverte (quite literally) loses the plot: the writing disintegrates into a mess of intertextuality and clunky self-referentiality, with the novelist having Corso continually feel as if he is a character in a serial novel - essentially, in a remake of a Dumas novel. Whether that's true or not, having it rammed down my, errrm, eyes so many times completely broke the spell.

One glaringly missed opportunity throughout is the aspect of whether the unidentified young girl (who takes the name "Irene Adler" from a Sherlock Holmes novel) actually exists, or is merely some kind of strange hallucinatory being, conjured up by Corso himself: a kind of "Dumas Club" meets "Fight Club", if you like. Kudos to Polanski for picking up this angle more strongly in his film. Perhaps she had to physically exist in the book as a result of Perez-Reverte's (I think wrong) decision to have to have one of the characters (Boris Balkan) as the storyteller. And so in the book, Irene's ambiguity centres not on whether or not she exists outside Corso' mind, but on whether for him she acts as a force for good or evil - an angel, succubus or demon.

All in all, I have to say that I really wish Perez-Reverte had found sufficient writing courage to take the horror through to its logical conclusion, rather than pull up short at the final hurdle. Though Polanski's literary take on the novel was (perhaps necessarily) quite superficial, his filmic instinct to raise the stakes yet higher than the book worked fabulously well.

For the full literary effect, I'd recommend reading "The Three Musketeers" first, then "Twenty Years After", then "The Dumas Club", and then watching "The Ninth Gate" late at night, with the curtains drawn, and a bottle of Bols gin by your side. Enjoy!

Incidentally, looking at the book with my Voynich research hat on, it was nice to see Perez-Reverte pick up on things like "The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient... Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" (p.202), and to have Torchia trawling around Prague for the cabalistic secrets of an unknown brotherhood (p.203). The uber-convoluted magic circle in the final chapter (p.312) is quite fun, too.

Of the three magic circles in the Voynich Manuscript, it is interesting that both sun and moon ones depict people holding bottles: here's the left man from the "hidden moon" magic circle - the "S" in his face probably denotes "Septentrio" (i.e. North). I'll write more about these another day: here's a link to an earlier post I made on William Kiesel's lecture at Treadwell's. Suffice it to say that this picture might simply refer to water and hyssop, both used to purify magic circles for millennia... unless you know better?

Voynich linguistic disproof!

Possibly as a byproduct of all the philosophy of science lectures I once endured, I've got a bit of a soft spot for Karl Popper. Basically, a Popperian approach to science involves constructing cunning weapons of disproof to chop down falsifiable hypotheses, where the "last man standing" is your current best bet at the truth. This is not unlike a somewhat formalized version of Conan Doyle's "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

To be honest, Conan Doyle's version is a tad sucky, as it assumes (to allow Sherlock Holmes to ever solve anything) that you are able to generate all possible explanations, in order that your process of elimination-by-disproof can ultimately iterate to the One True Truth. In the real world, however, an imaginative scientist should be able to conjure up candidate explanations at a faster rate than they could ever practically be tested.

Another very significant problem is the economic cost of constructing cunning weapons of disproof that will demonstrate that hypothesis X cannot be true. Doing this for even a single case can be very hard, let alone for situations where there are hundreds of possibilities.

Yet the scientific method typically works to an abysmally lower level of proof, looking merely for persuasive mental models and correlative statistics to back it up. Basically, the scientific method makes Bad Science easy to do because you haven't got Karl Popper peering over your shoulder saying there are no proofs, only disproofs, you haven't disproved anything.

All of which is simply to help paint a picture of the lamentable situation in which studies of the Voynich Manuscript have been for so long, where there are not only countless imaginative hypotheses to deal with, but also few if any Popperian tools of disproof. This has meant that people can (and do) make pretty much any pseudo-scientific assertion about the VMs they like and nobody can (without invoking particularly arcane statistical arguments which only a tiny minority can easily understand) tell them they're definitively wrong.

Until now.

Voynich researcher Marke Fincher has long been fascinated by Voynichese words' strange behaviour, and how it differs from the behaviour of words in real languages (such as Latin, French, Swahili, etc). Yet nobody had devised a way of making this difference visible.

But recently Marke developed a programme called WPPA which allows a lot of this structure to be made visible. In particular, Marke showed that real languages have an implicit word association structure whereby recurring pairs of words can be found not only next to each other, but at a certain distance from each other as well. Word pairs also largely prefer a particular order: Marke points out that "and the" is very much frequent in English than "the and".

His paper shows plots taken from a number of languages, which (when taken together) show what you might call a meta-linguistic curve, a statistical behaviour shape that is followed by basically all the real languages he had tried - an expression of languageness, in terms of the patterns of behaviour you'd fully expect to see in texts written in real-world languages.

But Voynichese does not display these curves: and so isn't a simple language.

Any, errrm, cunning linguist who thinks they have a sample of a little-known language which somehow bucks this trend is free to email Marke Fincher for a copy of his WPPA program (or you can just send him a copy of the text). But you know, I think he's not going to be dreadfully surprised by his inbox any day soon.

And not only is Voynichese not a simple language, it also is not a simple language written right-to-left, nor a simple substitution cipher of any sort (including simple verbose ciphers), nor a consistent intra-word transposition cipher (like a reverse anagram cipher), because none of these would alter Voynichese's basic linguistic curve.

For years, people have endlessly debated whether the nature of Voynichese is that of a cipher or that of a unknown language - cryptology vs linguistics. Well, Marke Fincher has now given us all his cunning Popperian machinery of disproof to rule out basically all simple language conjectures and a lot of simple cipher theories too.

This is great, because if someone now tries to convince you (for whatever reason) that the VMs is in High Middle German, Hebrew, Celtic, Shelta Thari or whatever but written in a funny way, you can wholeheartedly say - sorry, but no. Voynichese words don't work like any known language in several key ways, and that's that.

Moving ever forward, there is one thing I suspect that Marke should perhaps now consider: whether the fact that Voynichese word pairs appear pretty much as often forward as reversed (which isn't true of languages at all) is part of the "specification" (as it were) of Voynichese, or whether some lines (say, even-numbered lines within paragraphs?) might be word-ordered from right-to-left (i.e. some kind of boustrophedon word-ordering). That is, whether Voynichese's symmetrical reversibility might actually have a word-transpositional explanation.

Some people may think that being able to disprove things is no big deal: but I think it's actually a very big deal indeed. Karl Popper would be proud!

The 1860 Road Hill Murder...

The Saturday Guardian "Review" section contained a fascinating summary of "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; or, the Murder at Road Hill House" (2008, Bloomsbury) by its author Kate Summerscale. In it, she argues that the gruesome events at a country house in Road Hill in Wiltshire (and the police response to them) formed the template for English detective novels, such as in Wilkie Collins' well-known novel "The Moonstone" (1868).

The London detective sent to Road Hill, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, quickly "developed an ingenious solution to the mystery": however, when his theory became publicly known, he was "reviled in the press and the House of Commons", causing him to have a nervous breakdown and to retire from the force. Yet when, five years later, the murderer confessed, the grisly details were essentially as the detective had thought. All too late for poor Whicher, though.

What particularly caught my (Voynichological) eye in Summerscale's article was the Road Hill case's echo in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's (1862) novel "Lady Audley's Secret". Braddon's "tormented amateur detective Robert Audley" fearfully wonders who is the real madman - the woman he suspects of murder, or Audley himself caught in some kind of "obsessive delusion":-

"What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link is constructed out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crotchets - the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? Oh, my God, if it should be in myself all this time that the misery lies."

All of which I think near-perfectly expresses the self-reflective terror that is (or at least should be) ever-present in the Voynichologist: reconstructive imagination perched on a precipice.

Before "The Moonstone", the American history of the detective story goes back to Edgar Allan Poe's (1841) "The Murders in the rue Morgue", a locked room mystery with a surprising twist: but there is something about the English country house - its self-enclosed world of servants, class, envy, superficiality, insularity, etc - that lends itself to novel-length fiction.

Yet this is a false kind of knowledge, as the real Road Hill case demonstrates (Kate Summerscale reveals that Whicher believed two people were complicit in the murder, though only one confessed). In the context of constructing a 250-page book with neat closure, it is attractive: but the real world rarely fits into neatly filed boxes, carefully abstracted case-studies like the ones Harvard Business School professors famously used to construct in the 1960s and 1970s.

To me, this whole Victorian quest for smoking guns - for Holmesian certainty - is a kind of adolescent fantasy thinking, a pipedream of pure causality. In the real world, all we can actually do is sign up for the chase and give it our best shot: perhaps we will reach a satisfactory resolution in our attempts, perhaps we will not. But we must continue to try, all the same.