Thriller, Thriller, Burning Bright?

by

Lev Raphael

While I deplored the obvious errors and implausibilities in The Da Vinci Code, as well as its deeply disappointing ending, I read it with delectation anyway. I enjoyed the rush of events, the breakneck pacing, and the sheer lunatic brio of it all. It was a cultural phenomenon and it was fun (not that I ever booked a Da Vinci Code Tour). Even the controversy over the book was entertaining, and I shrugged at those reviewers and readers who claimed it was a new low in prose. I’d read far worse writing from regular bestselling authors David Baldacci and Steve Martini.

Dan Brown set a high standard for sales, however, and for showmanship. We’ll likely see thriller writers trying to emulate his success for years to come (if they’re not busy working on vampire books).  You can picture writers around the world studying his first megahit scene by scene, cataloging the elements, studying the pace and structure, and humming the song from A Chorus Line “I can do that!”

You need some of the following: a scholar/academic thrust into events seemingly beyond his control who has on his team a sexy sidekick and a quirky expert in an arcane field. Opposing them are a juicy villain to issue dire threats as they unravel a puzzle connected to age-old mysteries, a fabulous treasure of some kind, and The Vatican (if possible). There has to be plenty of fast-paced international travel; arcane references in languages most people don’t know; high speed chases; breath-taking escapes; exotic locales; puzzles; dusty manuscripts; and the sine qua non: short chapters ending as often as possible with a cliffhanger—all of it shoehorned into as tight a time frame as possible. 

Shake the whole thing like a snow globe. Keep shaking so that there’s a blizzard and what’s underneath can’t be discerned very well. Despite the relentless focus on buried truths, you don’t want readers looking too closely at what’s going on despite the minute attention in the book to details in, say, a painting or a manuscript. If they did, it would all seem too plastic.

Daniel Levin certainly keeps things moving around the Mediterranean in his debut thriller The Last Ember, which gives the Dan Brown formula a deeply Jewish twist. The conspiracy here involves illegal Arab excavations under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the aim of destroying any evidence that there was a First or Second Jewish Temple. Intertwined with that criminal destruction is the dizzying search for the eight-foot solid gold Temple Menorah, which is widely believed to have been carried by the Romans in triumph in Rome after they destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 C.E.

Levin's conceit is that the Temple Menorah was not only smuggled out of the Temple before its destruction by the Romans, but more miraculously, a flame is still burning in one of its branches, a flame that has burned for over two thousand years. As crazy as that sounds, his explanations for it all seem to make sense—on the surface.  And there’s lots of surface in this book, for all the time that characters spend digging and delving.

Levin’s hero Jonathan Marcus is a stylish, handsome attorney who deals specifically with cases involving antiquities because of his background in Classics. He’s been disgraced in his chosen field because of his involvement with an illegal excavation in Rome that led to a death, and he’s circuitously found his way to a position in a ritzy law firm. Though it's not mentioned, he apparently spends his off-hours rock climbing, hiking, spelunking, and swimming with Michael Phelps, because for much of the book he’s doing something like that in one vast secret underground palace, cavern, tunnel or another. Of course he barely gets scratched. His sidekick and former flame Emili is Italian and works for UNESCO. She suffers more physical harm than he does, but “fem jep” is a requirement of many mysteries and thrillers. 

The book hit the New York Times best seller list, thanks no doubt to its publisher’s heavy promotion and to the zeitgeist. After all, as Esquire’s Charles R. Pierce has written in Idiot America, “there's nothing more fundamentally American than . . . conspiracy theories. There is always secret knowledge, somewhere, being kept from us somehow, by someone.” The book offers secrets and plots by the bushel and could feed the hungry millions lusting to learn secrets of vast international and historical import, though it’s a real stretch to make the Temple Menorah sound as significant as the Ark of the Covenant.

I wish the publishing team had given Levin more editorial help, but they might have been too blinded by the razzle-dazzle to notice, for instance, that he slows the action down with clunky flashbacks at all the wrong times and that the writing itself is sometimes as weak as the structure.

Or notice that he can have a character speak “honorifically” and that he doesn’t seem to know the difference between “lay” and “laid.” Levin claims the Pope’s Swiss Guard wears “Elizabethan” uniforms. He describes a “brownstone” in Rome’s Jewish ghetto (that’s a long way for New Jersey sandstone to travel when better building materials were closer to hand).  And describes shattered glass from a bombed kiosk as “oozing.” When his hero gets battered underground, here’s how it’s described:

Now running, he slammed the top of his head into the ceiling, and piercing threads pulsed down his neck as though he had swallowed the pain. He keeled in silent agony, holding his head and feeling the dampness of the blood above his hairline. A flashlight's beam trained on him and observed him doubled over against the wall.

An explosion at the Colosseum yields this: “ ‘Irt!’ a German guide shrieked.  Earthquake!”

I haven’t found any German speakers who can explain that one to me. 

My favorite lines involved an extended comparison of the “voluptuous folds” of Emili’s lips to a Roman trireme bristling with oars. Yes, a trireme. As I think Whoopi Goldberg once said about Mick Jagger, “those are some big-ass lips!”

The book is dotted with factual errors: Racine did not write operas , as Levin claims, Racine wrote tragedies. I caught that because I’ve read one of them, which made me wonder how many basic mistakes there were in fields that are alien to me. That this obvious goof about the French playwright slipped past the book’s editor and copyeditor is more proof of how illiterate American society is becoming, how contemptuous some publishers are of the audience—or both.

At the core of the book's search for the Temple Menorah is an inscription found in Rome under the Colosseum and left by captured Hebrews almost two thousand years ago:

קודש   ARBOR  אור

Reading left to right, Marcus transliterates it as Kodosh Arbor Ohr: Sacred Tree of Light.

This is very problematic. The author never explains why first-century Jews would feel impelled to write in Hebrew and Latin if the clue is aimed for Jews alone, as indeed it is. He also doesn’t tell us why they carved from left to right instead of right to left, or why their Hebrew is ungrammatical.  Because what he has Marcus translate as “Sacred Tree of Light” is actually just three words strung together, one adjective and two nouns: “sacred/tree/light.”   

Far more significantly, Levin doesn’t give any rationale for why the clue was even partly written in Hebrew and not completely in Aramaic, the lingua franca of first-century Jews. But just as anomalous as the nature of the inscription is the fact that in order to hide the Menorah and keep it burning over millennia, Hebrew slaves apparently had time in Rome to build elaborate and enormous underground caverns replete with puzzling clues. These caverns call to mind not just the Indiana Jones series but The Lord of the Rings’ Mines of Moria.

In The Da Vinci Code, the author’s audacity won me over, or at least kept me going. Levin doesn’t display that kind of pizzazz, but like The Da Vinci Code, his book may make people feel their light reading has come with valuable lessons in archeology and other arcana, while they also enjoy a spiritual frisson or two.

A book like this sets you wondering what could possibly be next. I myself have been thinking of writing a thriller that features a frantic search for Martin Luther’s lost diary which could prove that he was actually a secret Catholic trying to spark deeper traditionalism in the Church and so his ultimate aim was to start the Counter-Reformation, not reform the Church. Luther the double agent! Another Vatican secret!  In my book, Luther's famous “95 Theses” turn out to be written in code and their true secret is embedded in the works of Counter-Reformation artists like Guido Reni, Carraci, Bernini. My hero would be a university linguist, and I’d throw in some Nazis plus a cavern of stolen artwork from World War II and mad dashes from Berlin to Rome to Vienna to Wittenberg and anyplace else I could add to the itinerary. I don't know much about Luther, but that’s what research assistants are for, right? Though I doubt an editor would notice or care anyway if I kept the balls in the air long enough. Oh, and I'll set scenes in Slovenia since most people don’t know where or what it is, and the capital city Ljubljana looks so exotic on the page.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Last Ember by Daniel Levin (Riverhead, 2009)
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Doubleday, 2003)


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.