Reviews

If Norfolk's first novel were indeed a dictionary, its first entries might well be accomplished, ambitious, and audacious. On one level this is a richly textured historical novel set at the end of the 18th century in London, Paris , and the Channel Islands. At the same time it subverts our expectations, revealing ``history '' as a vast conspiracy whose workings are both mysterious and inevitable. At its center is John Lempri ere, a (real) figure whose 1788 dictionary of mythology insists on springing to gruesome life. An army of cabalists and automatons, a virtual bureaucracy of the damned, plotting apocalypse, are ranged against him. Dauntingly elusive and allusive, but highly recommended for readers of Eco and Fowles. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/92.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.

Few discerning readers will care to hack through this choked jungle of historical fiction, fantasy and myth, despite the obvious intelligence and erudition British first novelist Norfolk displays here. John Lempriere, an actual 18th-century classicist and mythographer, perceives the world through the lenses of Greek and Latin fables. When he sees his father mangled by hunting dogs, just after both have witnessed a naked girl--John's adored Juliette--bathing in a forest stream, this evocation of Actaeon and Diana goads Lempriere to ``lay the ghosts to Antiquity'' by compiling his famed Dictionary . In 19th-century London, ancient ghosts proliferate. Lampriere views Pork Club revelers as Circe's swine; a grotesquely murdered woman who was fed molten gold is perceived as Danae, seduced by Jove in a golden rain; a Juliette lookalike, slain in a goatskin, is a latter-day Iphigenia. Interlarded is a bloated subplot, delineating a scam enacted generations earlier by a party of East India traders, which in 1627 led to Richelieu's crushing siege of the French city of La Rochelle when Huguenots sided with the English. During an eerie trance (paralleling the underworld visits of heroes Ulysses and Aeneas) Lempriere learns of his ancestor's meddling in the traders' ``Cabbala.'' It is the phantoms of history who drove him to authorship. Norfolk's superimposition of mythic patterns on urban life implies a model in James Joyce's Ulysses. While his scheme misfires, he is a writer of talent who may yet write a better novel. (Sept.)