The Alexandria Link

Steve Berry

New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-345-49724-6. Pp. 462, interview, maps

Although chronologically following The Templar Legacy, this novel has no connection to the predecessor except that it shares some of the main cast. The improbably named Cotton Malone—the almost-fifty athletic former agent for the Department of Justice, now bookseller in Copenhagen, and soon to be action figure at major retail stores—returns to an adrenaline-packed life of retirement that would make Bruce Willis grow some (white) hair. This time, the unknown bad guys kidnap his son, and then blow up his cozy bookstore, just to force him into a wild goose chase in an impromptu league with his estranged ex-wife Pam, whose stupidity is only exceeded by her foul mouth.

The purpose of this quest is the long-lost Library of Alexandria. Of course, it has been long lost only to us, the mere mortals. For its Guardians, it has been long known. Why the Guardians would choose not remain such a treasure hidden is anyone's guess. Why they would elect to reveal it only to a select few (who pass some rather mysterious but apparently stringent and somewhat ad hoc criteria), is a complete mystery. Unlike the well-used story of a (usually Templar) secret that would shake the foundations of the Vatican, the library does not seem to possess any particularly earth-shattering secrets aside from some wildly inaccurate maps of the then-known world, Pythagoras's death-bed repentance for his irrational hatred of the square root of 2, and the love letters of Augustine to his prepubescent servant boy. Oh, yes, and a copy of the Old Testament penned in its original Old Hebrew. Written on parchment from goats personally flayed by Moses. (Ok, ok, I know it should be papyrus, but this sounded way better, no?).

Why is this particular copy so important? Because it would reveal that the translations we have been using (based on St Jerome's version known as the Vulgate, which happens to be the Holy See's officially sanctioned Latin rendering of the Bible) are all... wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, incorrect. Faulty. Flawed. Unreliable. Untrustworthy. For those of us who prefer to get our history and archaeology from sources other than the Bible, this would come as a grave shock. For Christians who take the concoction as gospel (pardon the pun), the unpleasantness could be rather more severe. The basic (intentional) mistake is that contrary to the accepted hypothesis, the Jewish homeland is not in Palestine but in Arabia! This theory comes from the Lebanese professor Kamil Salibi, and its implications would be quite important if it were supported by the evidence.

I have to admit that beyond vague knowledge that no version of the Hebrew Bible we now have predates the 2nd century B.C. Conveniently, this is roughly when Simon Maccabaeus established the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom in Palestine after the revolt against the Seleucid Empire. This is important because the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are the oldest texts we currently possess) must also have been tampered with to support the theory in Berry's book, which states that the translators of the Old Hebrew Bible intentionally mangled the translations of various place-names so that they would locate the homeland in Palestine, as had been commonly accepted at the time. Berry says that Jerome did that on Augustine's instigation supposedly to minimize the friction of the new Christian faith with Judaism. This, of course, is wholly fictional, but whatever the reason for these mistakes might be, the theory rests on two premises: (a) there are no archaeological finds in Palestine that support any of the Biblical stories, and (b) many place-names in Arabia (Asir, near Yemen) correspond to places named in the Bible. The first part is probably due to Thomas L. Thompson, who concluded back in the seventies that there's not a shred of evidence to support any of the Biblical stories as history. The second part is Salibi's work. I, for one, find this wholly entertaining, and since I have no dog in this fight, I am quite willing to learn more about these things. (In all honesty, it would never have occurred to me to use the Bible as a guide to archaeology but apparently there are many who do!) Kudos to Berry for making me aware of this controversy. (Oh yeah, and before someone writes to rage about how Eilat Mazar found King David's palace as described in the Book of Samuel, let's just call that "a large stone structure" seeing as there is not a shred of evidence to support her identification.)

Now, how does one make a thriller out of Biblical archaeology when Indiana Jones created and exhausted the genre? Berry, for one, pulls out all the stops: here we have the U.S. government (president, vee-pee, attorney general, and other high-ranking officials), Mossad (and through them, the Israeli government), Saudis, a shadowy but immensely rich European society called the Order of the Golden Fleece, and assorted assassins, some with their own agenda. All of these entities are after the Library, or, more to the point, the original Bible and its secret. And why? Because should it become known that the Jewish homeland is in Arabia, all sorts of bad things will happen. In no particular order, first, the legitimacy of the state of Israel would be undermined (that is, if one believes in the Abrahamic Covenant rather than the historically well-established location of the Hasmonean Kingdom or the mundane other reason for locating Israel where it is today—the Arabs backed the wrong horse in the Second World War, the Jews did not, and Europe was looking to expiate for its genocidal sins, as usual at someone else's expense). Second, the Muslims would be mightily pissed off both because the Jews really had no business founding a state in Palestine and because they could lay claim to lands that contain the holiest places of Islam, not just the third holiest. I, for one, am not sure how this dilemma would be resolved. Three, European shadowy but immensely rich societies can benefit from destabilizing the Middle East. How exactly, is anyone's guess. Fourth, the US would be hurt by instability in the Middle East. This one is easy to understand. What is less easy to understand is how the V.P. thinks he can benefit from it. Fifth, somehow the revelation of the truth would cause the US to tilt away from Israel and toward the Arabs. This, of course, is wishful thinking—the American foreign policy in the region is so schizophrenic that only a most dedicated conspiracy theorist could claim to identify consistent support for anything other than one goal: preventing any one power from dominating this oil-rich region.

At any rate, all of these entities enter the fray, and all of them rely on Cotton Malone to follow the clues to the hidden Library. This time, at least, we have an explanation of the suspiciously quick solutions to the easy puzzles—unbeknownst to him, Malone is on a fake quest (hmmm... echoes of the plot device in Angels & Demons?). I, however, lost much interest in tracking who was backstabbing whom and instead raced forward from country to country and clue to clue as Malone was solving puzzles, killing people, avoiding being killed in return, and generally making himself a nuisance to friend and foe alike. I honestly did not see the point of going to Lisbon and the church there, but what is a quest without a church? I also really disliked Stephanie—for a boss of an ultra-elite bureau, she is downright stupid, not to mention annoying with her bad mouth and awful manners. My annoyance with her, however, paled in comparison with the hatred I have for Pam, Malone's ex. Berry, like Dan Brown, seems thoroughly incapable of creating a decent female character that would be competent without being a bitch and intense without being hysterical. The cliches Berry gives us are so well-trodden, they should by now have been ground into dust.

An enjoyable fare despite the gaping holes in logic and common sense, The Alexandria Link makes me want to read the next Berry novel. Incidentally, what is this "Bainbridge Museum" in Oxfordshire?

June 21, 2009