The Fire

Katherine Neville's The Fire is a worthy successor to her fabulously fun book, The Eight.

The Eight is a smart, fast-paced book of historical intrigue, international adventure and chess. It is full of codes, figures of the French revolution, and lucky escapes. Everything is symbolic, and usually adds up to eight (reading the notes from The Fire, I just learned that there were 64 characters in The Eight, which would explain the annoying additions of Bach, Benedict Arnold, and Muammar Gaddafi). It was a huge hit in 1988 because it was fun and there was nothing else like it (DaVinci Code having not been written and Tale of Two Cities having been long forgotten). The Eight was passed around my friends and made it to my parents' book club, where it was received as fun escapism by members of both sexes. Like a good plot-driven puzzle book, everything suddenly fits at the end and it wraps up nicely. It remains one of my favorite books and the kind of book I want to read while travelling.

So, like most fans, I was annoyed at Katherine Neville for writing a sequel. When the Mister asked me what I was reading, I replied, "A book that shouldn't have been written." Yet, like most fans, I was anxious to read it and delighted when Supplement 'Scriber (with whom I shared a love of The Eight while we were roommates in college) gave it to me. Fortunately, Neville does creatively untangle some ends and readers are involved with new characters in a new quest that sheds an interesting light on the quest of The Eight. Of course it is not nearly as good as The Eight and there are twice as many obvious symbols (everything relates to fires, triangles, eights or chess, not just eights and chess) but I still enjoyed reading it.

If you like suspending disbelief and careening on a far-fetched, symbol-studded romp, read The Eight. If you need more, wait a while and read The Fire.

Gripe: Katherine Neville does her homework. The charm in both books is figuring out that this could have happened, at least historically and geographically. Talleyrand did marry that woman and have that chef, Byron did live in Italy and Greece at the end of his life, the Minerva Terrace in Yellowstone has dried up several times . . . At the end of The Fire she lists four pages of experts consulted on topics ranging from the weather conditions at Attu to Baghdad to open hearth cooking. She doesn't list anyone for Colorado, which is probably how she got away with saying that the characters had a cabin at Mesa Verde, "fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau" where one could see the "vast billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks" from the drive lined with blue spruce trees. Huh? The height of the Colorado Plateau is 11,000 feet. 14,000 feet is a good 2,000 feet above tree line in Colorado and few spruces would ever be on the edge of a windswept plateau. Not to mention that there are no three mile high mountains in Colorado, or in the contiguous US for that matter. Katherine, if you bothered to correctly look up the Dine names of the peaks, why couldn't you check their elevation?