The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale
Doubleday, $38.99
British biographer and journalist Farndale is a guy with big plans. In 400 pages he manages to include the Battle of Passchendaele, a plane crash off the Galapagos, a Mahler manuscript, a life-saving turtle, spectral visions, a daughter's abduction, a bombing, enough angels and demons to make Dan Brown blink, and a brain tumour.
Giddy? So is this novel, some of the time. Daniel Kennedy is a biologist. He specialises in nematodes, as we get told often. He has no time for fantasy or the supernatural, as we are told often.
The tale springs from his story to that of his great-grandfather in World War I (cue attacks through mud, an amputee, astonishing escapes), to those of other participants.
As a pedal-to-the-metal thriller, it belts along - provided you don't expect much plausibility. Coincidences rule, which again is fine if you don't expect much ... etc. A catalogue of characters, among them a professor of music for whom the real stuff ends at Elgar, a comely Asian student, a teacher who may be a bomber, a therapist who may be a psychopath, carry things towards several enigmatic endings.
But The Blasphemer has other ambitions as well. It offers portentous comment on sacrifice and cowardice, devotion, betrayal and redemption. It affects to explore the conflict between science and the supernatural - the latter starts just 12 pages in, with a phantom, knowingly-smiling hitchhiker in Muslim dress, then moves via messages from past lives to an out-of-body trip and trope.
This is a good ripping yarn, pumped up into bad literature. Farndale's prose style veers from crimson to purple. He can't bear to leave anything out: switching on the bathroom light takes nearly half a page. We're told everything characters say, think and feel, plus what they wear and what's playing on the radio.
Individual episodes are engrossing enough, but there's far too much of several good things.
If genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, tedium is the result of listing their infinite results.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
