The Last Templar

Raymond Khoury

New York: Signet, 2005. ISBN: 0-451-21995-3. Pp. 526

I am ashamed to admit it, but I have been feeling some longing for a Vatican conspiracy novel. Preferably set in modern times but with some mysterious medieval secrets that are just plausible enough to keep the book from being totally off the wall. (It's too much to ask for a book in which the Catholic Church is not the villain, although I think one can profitably write a few of those as well.) In my defense, The Last Templar is one of those ill-advised airport bookstore acquisitions that one may plausibly blame on exhaustion with travel delays or irritation with security measures that make me remove my belt and sneakers numerous times while the government is busy peddling PR "winning hears and minds" campaigns instead of just hunting down and shooting the damned terrorist assholes... but I digress. At any rate, I have what's known in the biz as "plausible deniability" so you can't use this as evidence if I should ever be put on trial for having atrocious taste for my reading material.

I don't know what the authors of all those breathless reviews have been reading (or who has been paying them to write the blurbs), but it's not this book. Yeah, it's fast-paced (in fact, it's so fast, it was too easy for the narrative to get entangled in its own feet and splatter flat on the ground like so much badly concocted pancake mix). Yeah, it mixes romance with action (although the romance is of the juvenile variety, with an ostensibly smart guy going bonkers over a pretty face and forgetting elementary rules of FBI procedural). Yeah, it deals with old secrets (although this particular one left me cold, mostly because the "proof" of the myth of Christ would have been convincing to no one). Yeah, there are some Templars (who get hacked by Saracens or sold to slavery by unfriendly Tuscans). Yeah, there are some modern-day murders which, although spectacular, are just plain stupid (people with swords and horses storming the Met? instead of quietly raiding the customs scan files?) And the ending... oh well.

Basically, the story begins with the expulsion of the Templars from the Holy Lands. On their way back, their ship is wrecked and they are assaulted by some Mamelukes who are known to history as particularly dismissive of any notions of hospitality. The Templars manage to preserve a secret scroll which is almost lost when the guy entrusted with it is sold as a slave. He finally escapes only to reach Paris just in time for the auto da fe of the Grand Master of his order. He swears revenge and then nothing happens until the 21th century when a professor irked at the Catholic Church takes matters into his own hands.

Now, said professor hates the Church because its priest had advised him and his wife against abortion, and she ended up dying during childbirth. This, apparently, is the fault of the Catholic Church and not a consequence of (a) one's own decisions, and (b) shit that occasionally happens. The prof, displaying a lapse of logic that would have caused me to give such a cringe-inducing explanation an F, decides to destroy the Church. Because, you see, not only is he pissed off, but he also has lost his faith and has concluded that God is a fraud. Well, at least in the Christian version of it (we are not told what his views on Islam or Buddhism are). At least his shaky grip on reality can excuse the bizarre raid of the Met.

On "our" side are FBI agent Sean and archaeologist Tess. He is Catholic and she is not. But she is pretty. And smart. She almost always speaks in full sentences. Especially when she is delivering the obligatory historical background that would benefit readers who are assumed to know nothing. This, incidentally, is a very annoying tendency in all these historically-based fiction novels. Take, for instance, her crash-course in Temple/Templar history on pp. 105-08. This is such a clumsy device, one should clobber the editor for letting it through. I fully understand that these publishers believe readers are nearly illiterate imbeciles, but maybe this background is better included in an endnote, an appendix, whatever? Just imagine a real-life situation where characters suddenly pause to explain some murky historical detail replete with dates!

But I digress. So Sean and Tess are going on the trail of the Met raid perpetrators when bodies start piling up. I, for one, immediately knew who the killer was: there's only one direct representative of the Catholic Church, and these never fare well in such novels. At any rate, there are the positively mind-boggling coincidences, lie Tess calling Columbia University to look for Vance, being told that he's resigned his position upon his wife's death, googling her obituary and... wouldn't you know it, finding out that the five-year anniversary of her death is the following day (!), which (naturally!) means that Vance would be at her grave because there's no way that she could have been buried anywhere else or that he would miss that, combined with the truly inexplicable ability of De Angelis to locate Vance's co-conspirators, and garnished with the embarrassingly inept handling of the manhunts by the authorities.

Then there's the love story in which an introvert Catholic who has hang-ups on account of his dad's suicide (you see, he believes its inheritable, so he may end up offing himself and putting his wife though real misery) falls hard for the ravishing and smart divorcee. He's so smitten with her that he (a) runs off with her to Turkey in an astonishing neglect of his duties as an FBI agent, and (b) having seen just how determined she is to discover the secret and make a career splash out of it tells her that he won't permit her to make it public... and then does not, for a second, think that she will bolt. Which she does, of course. (And I am leaving aside the entire underwater sequence with disintegrating churches and other credulity-stretching sequences.)

Okay, so maybe all his blood rushed to his penis and the oxygen-deprived brain could not process simple logic. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I needed in order to finish the book. Since I did not get it, I could not miss the glaring holes in the story. Like the entire sequence during the storm. So the ship with the scroll sinks and then... the unlikely survivors (both Sean and Tess, of course) end up on the same dinky island and she takes a random walk on the beach and stumbles across the ship's falcon figurehead (in which the scroll had been hidden) which has washed ashore on the same island. I almost threw the book in the trash can at this point. I mean, come one, how likely is that? Khoury did not even have the decency to have some fishermen recover the damnable thing.

The worst offender, however, is the ending. After so many trials and tribulations, the explosive secret turns out to be a lot less impressive than one might have thought. So it's a gospel. So it's older than the existing ones. So it claims to have been written by Jesus himself. So it says Jesus was not divine. So? How would one ascertain that it was written by Jesus and not by some Pharisee who was trying to undermine the growing new cult? It's not like we have samples with Jesus's handwriting to compare to. Or, another version, it's just one of many gospels that were floating around back then, often showing contradictory traditions of the developing religion that was still in flux theologically and philosophically? Any one of these would work in setting aside what is presumably the most damaging portion of that gospel, the "proof" that Jesus was a man.

Not only that, but Tess's handling of the secret was atrocious although my beef here is not so much with the logic of her decision (I can easily see people making it) but with its substance. She, in her infinite superior wisdom, decides for the rest of humanity what we are allowed to know or not know. All those pretty little Greek churches, all those earnest religious people, she cannot take their faith away from them. She cannot reveal that they have lived a lie. Such breath-taking hubris is only plausible in an academic who has lost all touch with reality. (Thankfully, her profession makes that decision plausible.) I simply cannot fathom that religious people would give any credence to any document she revealed to the world. First, faith is a matter of socialization and not on thorough reading of the Bible (or history) and logical examination of details. All those Christian apologetics are only meant for people who already believe. Logic cannot lead to faith. Since logic is not necessary for faith, it follows that its absence is not sufficient to undermine faith either. Second, I think most people would simply ignore the find or explain it away just like I did with the two plausible alternatives above. This means that even the logic that was supposed to undermine their faith will be challenged, and quite successfully I should think. Third, I resented the multicultural implication that we should care about the preservation of pretty churches and backward peoples even at the cost of truth. If Tess really thought she had found truth, she had a moral obligation to tell the rest of us about it, even if that meant all those pretty Greek churches would end up as museums.

All this makes Tess's final choice unintentionally funny. She destroys the secret thereby believing that she is saving all those poor, innocent, well-intentioned souls misled by that evil, greedy, murderous, pompous, lying Catholic Church. But there's nothing really to worry about in her discovery and so she ends up destroying the only evidence that could have revived her flagging academic career. At least she has the hopefully not-prone-to-insanity FBI agent who may not be quite that attractive, who may be a bit slow and boring, but who... oh well, I have no clue why Tess would fall for him, so there you go.

March 28, 2007