TIMES
LITERARY SUPPLEMENT - MARCH 24, 1978
Cosmic Cuts
Edward Whittemore:
Sinai Tapestry
310pp, Wildwood House. 4.95.
by Eric Korn
Literature is full
of novels that chart the rise and fall of empires to
show that life has its ups and downs, or manipulate
cosmic events to tell us that there is nowt so queer
as folk. Sinai Tapestry is a choice example: with a
cast that includes a seven and a half foot omnilingual
botanical genius, the most expert swordsman of his century;
an Albanian fanatic who spends a lifetime forging the
Codex Sinaiticus because the genuine one is profoundly
heterodox; a 3,000-year-old antique dealer with a vision
of the Holy City ("when you are defending Jerusalem
you are always on the losing side"); and a Sinn
Feiner with second sight who supplies arms to Haganah
while disguised as a Crimean War hero; with such a cast--and
a plot unlimited by space, time, or verisimilitude--it
should be possible to come up with more interesting
conclusions than that the world is a rum old place.
Nor are the mechanisms
refreshingly unfamiliar: the ubiquitous conspiracies
are a pinchbeck Pynchon, the theological speculation
gracelessly Borgesian, the physical eccentricities Peakeresque,
the figs-and-fico locale is Durrelloid, the climactic
scene of the Smyrna evacuation is deployed like the
bombing of Desden in Slaughterhouse Five. There is some
nicely unfocused Irish dialogue but here one recognizes
Flann O'Brien as another unwilling godfather.
Eric Korn
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