Book Magazine
Things don't go exactly the way Justin plans. Instead, a condescending assistant kicks him out of the office after reading him an editor's scrawled evaluation: "Pompous, quasi-religious allegory of sex and revolution...No one would read it."Justin is essentially a stand-in for author James Thackara, and the rejected manuscript is The Book of Kings itself. And by this point in the narrative, it's also obvious why Thackara had difficulty getting The Book of Kings into print: It is a pompous, quasi-religious allegory of sex and revolution. But that doesn't mean no one will, or should, read it.The Book of Kings has been kicking around for years, according to a New Yorker article published in December 1997. Editors and agents who had attempted to work with Thackara, said that as promising as the book was, its literary quality was wildly uneven—and Thackara consistently refused to make the necessary changes.The New Yorker article attracted some attention, as New Yorker articles will, an...d eventually an editor at Overlook Press, Tracy Carns, read the manuscript and got in touch with Thackara."He wanted an editor who saw the book the way he did," Carns told me. "I said I'd edit 100 pages, show him the editing, and if he'd let me continue to edit in that vein then [Overlook would] make an offer, and if he didn't like it, we'd call it a day."As it turned out, Carns said she and Thackara were on the same page about where they wanted the manuscript to go. "So our working together was really smooth—not that there wasn't any friction, but everything was resolved. Where there was a difference of opinion, the author has to prevail. It's his book."That may not have been the wisest course to take. Nevertheless, the book has been published, and must now be accepted in this seriously flawed form or not at all.The Book of Kings begins with four brilliant students at the Sorbonne in 1930s Paris, who share an elegant apartment on the Rue de Fleurus—thus their adopted nickname for themselves, "the Fleurisians." Two—Johannes Godard and the baron-to-be David von Sunda—are German; Justin is French-Algerian; and Duncan Penn is American.Europe is drawing closer to world war with every passing day, and although the American seems to be shoehorned into the story mainly in order to sire a son who can narrate this tale in retrospect, the lives of the other three will be inextricably bound up with the course of that war, and the fate of the whole world.Thackara's work distinctly shows the influence of Tolstoy's War and Peace, that sprawling tableau of the events that culminated in Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812; as well as Ayn Rand's two dystopian novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Only Tolstoy's epic takes real history as its core, but all three attempt to prove, among other things, that dire consequences inevitably follow the universal relaxation of a moral code. And all three do this by intricately depicting the lives, both public and private, of a set of very different souls, each representative of a cultural norm.A 20th-century, World War II version of Tolstoy's masterpiece makes perfect sense, and Thackara effectively adapts Tolstoy's vision and structure to what is, after all, a remarkably similar story line. But with the exception of Helene, a creature very much like Tolstoy's Natasha with whom all four Fleurisians fall in love, Thackara clearly modeled his characters on Rand's: Justin Lothaire is a John Galt/Howard Roark clone. David Sunda bears a striking resemblance to Rand's Peter Keating (The Fountainhead). Johannes Godard's childhood friend Joachim could have been modeled on the evil Ellsworth Toohey (ditto). And most obviously, there is Johannes himself, the brilliant philosopher whose moral destruction echoes those of The Fountainhead's Gail Wynand and Atlas Shrugged's Dr. Stadler.Unfortunately, Thackara is no Leo Tolstoy. Truth be told, he is no Ayn Rand either, for, didactic as she was, she did create characters that haunt one's spirit long after the book has been read and shelved. Thackara's characters rarely attain that power.On the other hand, there is unexpected brilliance in the vivid, terrifying battle scenes and in the gradual, inexorable moral descent of David Sunda and Johannes Godard—particularly Godard, whose fall is quicker and thus mostly contained within two riveting chapters. There are vignettes of enormous emotional power. Then again, there are passages of mind-boggling awkwardness, and incredibly silly plot twists. The last portion of the novel, for example, contains two separate digressions involving the children of two of the Fleurisians, and both stories seem to have drifted in from the pages of another novel. Finally, Thackara's language frequently devolves into meaningless rhetoric. ("On the high icy plateaus of the Oberland, nothing will have changed. For it is a long way from the Oberland to the fever jungles of the Amazon, and every inch of that way is legend.") And hundreds of paragraphs begin: "And thus it was..." But though there are passages of gobbledygook that invite cheap shots, there are also scenes Tolstoy would have envied, a few characters Rand would recognize as descendants of her own best creations—and above all and throughout, an electricity that derives directly from the author's anguished cries for justice, which are the almost palpable subtext under every line of type.—Nan Goldberg Read more Less