The Egyptologist: Final Report

The Egyptologist turned out to be a good book, not quite delivering on its early promise, but definitely a rewarding read: fun and thought-provoking. At the very least, you'll learn tons about the sate of the art of archaeology in 1922.

The tedium in the second half, which I reported in my most recent post here, was relieved toward the end, when events finally began to break, a new character's perspective was added to the story (via yet more letters), and, of course, I finally found out who was who, and who done what.

"Who was who?" was really the more interesting question. The blurbs on the back of the book, by such luminaries as Gary Shteyngart and XXX, all call attention to the themes of immortality and fame in the book -- the most obvious topics Phillips was exploring, with everyone from pharoahs to academics to small-fry private eyes vying to burn their names indelibly into the pages of time. Indeed, Phillips has a very sure hand when painting people's vanities. Funny stuff.

But I was more intrigued by Phillips' games with the notion of identity. No one is who they seem to be, even after you think you've figured out who they really are. More interesting yet is who they think they are, and what they do because of it. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives, as any narrative-oriented therapist will tell you, motivate or justify our actions, and help us make sense of our past. When that capacity runs out of control, feeding and being fed purely by ego, how far out of joint are the results likely to be? Lives get their circuits crossed, and much disaster -- or hilarity, depending on how mordant your sense of humor is -- ensues.

The Expedition Bogs Down

I've been enjoying The Egyptologist (see previous post) by Arthur Phillips, but I have to admit the second half hasn't been as fun as the first. He got off to a rip-roaring start, then settled in to pleasant clip. But by the mid-point, it began to feel like the Pulitzer Syndrome (see my explanatory post here) was setting in, even though his first effort didn't win that prize. It was, however, a huge success, and perhaps no one doing the preliminary reading for the second book had the guts to say, "Uh, listen Art, this is great stuff -- GREAT! But, uh... the second half; it gets a little, uh, slow."

Don't get me wrong, it's still quite enjoyable, and I might still recommend the book (I have to finish it to be sure). The characters are gorgeously drawn, and their language (on display so resplendently in their correspondence, which makes up the whole of the book) is delicious. But I feel like I'm stuck in the exposition section of the book and it's regenerating itself. Perhaps it's the device of using only letters as text that bound him to unfold the plot so slowly; each of the letter-writers doesn't know what the other one knows, and they're on opposite sides of the earth, in the 1920s, before international telephone service, much less email. It's amusing to watch letters cross in the mail, cables (enigmatically brief because of their cost) misinterpreted... but it can only provide the backbone of a story for so long.

Some of the characters might be utter liars, not even who they pretend to be. Some might simply be fooling themselves and wreaking havoc because of it. I'm tired, though, of not knowing and being pulled back and forth. It's unfair after 200 pages to not have revealed even a little of what's what. It's really quite fun for a good while, but then suddenly I find myself skimming whole paragraphs, even pages.

In the final third of the book,Trillipush interprets a very long set of hieroglyphs (not hieroglyphics, as he points out), and the resulting text goes on for pages and pages, doing nothing to move the plot forward. Oh, I get the idea: Phillips is doing a little reverse psychoanalysis, in which Trillipush uses the mytho-historical figure of the Egpytian king to vent all his inner frustrations and secrets. Clever and fun for a few paragraphs, but nothing new gets revealed. A little of this goes a very long way.

What keeps me reading is, of course, the desire to see the mystery solved. With all the excess, there's still a pull to find out whodunit, or, more aptly, who's fooling who. Also, there's still some good flavor left in Phillips' frothy concoction, even after pouring on too much sugar for too long. But he'd better move it along. His character Trillipush wowed his creditors into investing in his expedition with promises of a huge discovery of gold artifacts and historical insight. Phillips made a similar promise with considerable brio at the beginning of The Egyptologist. By now, both creditors and reader are getting impatient.

A Dangerous Plot for Boys

Greetings, friends. I feel the need to hail you because it's been so long between posts; days at a time. Life is a whirlwind here in Thinkuland.

Charles McGrath has an interesting article in last Sunday's Times about The Dangerous Book for Boys. (See my post on the book here.) It seems Disney has contracted with director Scott Rudin ("The Queen" and "School of Rock") to produce a movie based on the book. Hard to conceive, really. I liked the book, myself, but come on: A Rudyard Kipling poem and a piece on how to make a paper water-bomb hardly seem like blockbuster material.

McGrath points out that the book's not nearly as dangerous as it makes itself out to be, since "there is less stuff to do in [it] than to read about." True, though making a vinegar-powered battery might be as dangerous as we can hope for from today's plugged-in, tuned-out lads. (I spent the summer with 50 of them, and getting them to put their GameBoys away for more than five minutes -- even in favor of interpersonal games they really loved -- was a continual struggle.) And besides, dangerous or not, a vinegar battery is still pretty darn cool.

But like McGrath, I'm skeptical of the movie, and I enjoyed the plot line he predicts:

A dad who, worried that his son is becoming a softy and a wuss, buys an under-the-counter copy of a mysterious Edwardian tome and forces the boy to listen as he reads aloud from it. “Don’t swagger,” he says, quoting Sir Frederick Treves. “The boy who swaggers — like the man who swaggers — has little else that he can do. He is a cheap-Jack crying his own paltry wares.”

Pretty soon the two of them are off in the woods together, killing rabbits, talking Latin, reciting Kipling and, safely away from women, companionably breaking wind. Junior ties knots, makes flint arrowheads and recites the rules of Rugby while Dad — Pater, that is — sucks on his pipe and lectures the lad about cold showers and avoiding “beastliness.”

Meanwhile, Mom has bought a book of her own, a home-repair manual, and has set about changing all the locks.