Edward Whittemore: Sinai Tapestry
310pp, Wildwood House. 4.95.
by Eric Korn

Literature is full of novels that chart the rise and fall of empires to show that life has its ups and downs, or manipulate cosmic events to tell us that there is nowt so queer as folk. Sinai Tapestry is a choice example: with a cast that includes a seven and a half foot omnilingual botanical genius, the most expert swordsman of his century; an Albanian fanatic who spends a lifetime forging the Codex Sinaiticus because the genuine one is profoundly heterodox; a 3,000-year-old antique dealer with a vision of the Holy City ("when you are defending Jerusalem you are always on the losing side"); and a Sinn Feiner with second sight who supplies arms to Haganah while disguised as a Crimean War hero; with such a cast--and a plot unlimited by space, time, or verisimilitude--it should be possible to come up with more interesting conclusions than that the world is a rum old place.

Nor are the mechanisms refreshingly unfamiliar: the ubiquitous conspiracies are a pinchbeck Pynchon, the theological speculation gracelessly Borgesian, the physical eccentricities Peakeresque, the figs-and-fico locale is Durrelloid, the climactic scene of the Smyrna evacuation is deployed like the bombing of Desden in Slaughterhouse Five. There is some nicely unfocused Irish dialogue but here one recognizes Flann O'Brien as another unwilling godfather.

Eric Korn