Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

This literary thriller, involving a series of murders in 1865 Boston, and a band of ageing sleuths comprising five of America's most famous poets, goes to show that there's nothing the modern horror/spatter writer can dream up that doesn't already reside in literature's classics.

It is impossible to talk about this book without mentioning its author: Pearl is a wunderkind, a first-time author just four years out from two top-class degrees at Harvard (in literature and law), during which he won the prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America. In The Dante Club, he balloons his learning and love of Dante into this most unusual novel, which blends gory thrill with learned conversation, arcane historical detail and underlying observations about nationhood that are aimed at the America of today, as much as they are about that crucial moment in the union's history.

Timing is everything. In 1865 the Civil War was just over, and the nation reeling from division and horrific loss of life. Thus, the Harvard Corporation was implacably opposed to the poet Longfellow's plan to undertake the first American translation of Dante's Inferno — his "autobiography of a human soul" — into English. So much blood and gore, these purse-string holders reasoned, would offend the shell-shocked public, and there were also difficulties involved in the Catholic orientation of the classic work at a time when Protestant Boston was being invaded by Catholic immigrants.

Nevertheless, Longfellow gathered around him a group of fellow Dante lovers — poets Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, historian George Washington Greene and publisher J. T. Fields — and they embarked upon the translation. So far, so accurate. Then Pearl introduces his own plot: high-ranking Bostonians begin to be murdered in ways replicating Dante's imagined hellish punishments — worms, maggots, buryings alive, burning feet, shredded bodies — and our unlikely heroes set out to discover their Lucifer.

Pearl has tremendous talent, and a marvellous ability to convey complex ideas and history to an audience which, largely, will not be familiar with his territory. His faux 19th-century melodramatic style weakens the overall effect, though, and his pacing falters at crucial moments. While bit by bit it's captivating, powerful, fascinating, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Vintage, $26.95