THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl
Book Quote:
“I’m afraid,
Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite
understand why.”
You could classify
The Dante Club loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try
historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to
be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs,
psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.
The setting is
Boston in 1865, the main protagonists include the real-life characters of a
group of poets. At the time of the action they are unified by the project of
translating into English (for the first time in America) Inferno by Dante. They
include Oliver Wendell Holmes (poet, author and medical doctor), J.T. Fields
(notable publisher), James Russell Lowell (poet, professor and editor), George
Washington Green (historian and minister), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(poet). When a series of spectacularly grisly murders hit the sleepy crime
scene in Boston, they start to become aware that the crimes are copy-cat
renderings of some of the punishments meted out to sinners in the very Inferno
they are working on. As only a handful of people have any knowledge of the work
in question, the list of suspects is effectively pared down to members of the
club, and a few others. Rumbling in the background are the after-shocks and
repercussions of the recent Civil War.
Already, some
readers have probably been put off by the list of heavy-duty literary
characters. They shouldn’t be. You don’t need to know anything about the
protagonists further than what is given to you on the page, and their
personalities are not only lively but jumping out of the book with
individuality. As a murder mystery the piece is perfectly balanced. The focus
of possibility of guilt moves continually, silently – the reader is never left
idle for speculation. The action is vivid, the murders horrific and bizarre.
There are no spurious red-herrings thrown in for the sake of it. The denouement
is thoroughly satisfying in every way.
The rounded
sub-plots are almost all instrumental to the dual purpose of further fleshing
out the characters and in revolving the possible finger or guilt. Holmes’s fear
of loss of literary fame and his lack of empathy with his son, Longfellow’s
grief for the loss of his wife, Lowell’s embattlement with the Harvard
authorities over the validity of teaching Dante (and modern language works in
general), as well as his suicidal tendencies. Patrolman Rey (Boston’s first
Black police officer) and his difficulties as a figure of authority in a
racially divided society, and Augustus Manning’s maniacal obsession of bringing
the University and press under his control. They are all brought together in an
extremely solid framework where the reader will step firmly, even if the
territory is unfamiliar.
But what relevance,
I hear a myriad silent voices quizzing, are either Boston in the 1860s or the
works of a 14th century poet? The core thread to both the Boston story and
Pearl’s central theme lies in the work of the Inferno itself.
It is an
undisputable fact that everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Inferno
finds it at the very least memorable – probably on a level they don’t even
realise. And Inferno is exceedingly well known. My own most vivid recollections
of other works derivative of Dante’s Hell are the 1995 film “Se7en” and the
2005 TV drama “Messiah: the Harrowing,” but the briefest search on Wiki for
“Dante and his Divine Comedy in Popular Culture” throws up page after page of
references. Dante has made his way into the TV series “Angel” and into
“Futurama.” He’s in video games, art and sculpture, music – and of course,
literature. In this sense, The Dante Club is not in the least an esoteric book.
Why are we so fond
of Dante? Certainly, the punishments in Inferno are grim, and there is no age
throughout history in which we have not derived a macabre thrill from pure and
bloody spectacle. This is not the cause of its popularity. If it were, we would
all be reading torture accounts from the Spanish Inquisition instead. The
appeal is in the precise reason it was written: a yearning for justice. Any
class or race of human has an inbuilt auto-response system to the myriad of
inevitable injustices, great or small, to themselves or to others. “That’s not
fair!” is often chased fast by the thought “This is how it should be.” It is
the meting out of punishments in an appropriate way (Dante’s contrapasso) that
is irresistible to the human psyche. And it is precisely this that is Pearl’s
theme. The series of murders are for a long period incomprehensible, but
through the key of Dante they are shown to be composed from an almost
autistically accurate logic. It is perhaps no coincidence that after graduating
from Harvard in English and American Literature, Pearl went straight on to take
a Law degree at Yale Law School.
There are some
disconcerting aspects to the book. These mainly stem from the dichotomy between
extremely well-researched, knowledgeable, fact-based fiction on the one hand
and the occasional (but crucial) forgery here and there. It throws the reader
off balance a little. Pearl knows his literary characters very well, and their
behaviour rings true to what one would expect. The scene is Boston is extremely
convincing and is no doubt based on intimate knowledge of the place and its
history. However, the notion of the characters in question being involved in
this type of criminal investigation is nothing short of preposterous, and the
concepts of applied psychology and forensic logic which are brought to play are
completely anachronistic. We are left teetering a little at the realisation
that the writer is assuming we don’t need to be told what’s fact and what’s
fiction: we’re grown-ups and understand that we’re listening to a story that
simply uses these vehicles.
So far, we’ve
established that it’s a good story, relevant to today, and accessible to a
non-literary audience. Now for the caveat. You will enjoy this book ten times
more if you are familiar with Inferno on some reasonably detailed textual
level. The greatest strength of The Dante Club is the incredible interweaving
of the plot on both the levels of the Boston scene and Dante’s exiled
imaginings. Quite a number of reviews state that the book “starts off slowly” –
this despite the first murder being mentioned on page 1, the first maggoty
corpse discovered on page 8, and the first suicide leaping to a gory death on
page 28. What they mean is, you don’t understand what’s going on for a good
while. This is true, on a plot level. On a metatextual level, the plot is
progressing at breakneck speed. The skill and accuracy of quotations and
resonances between the two works, within the framework of immaculate modern
prose, is the true delight of this novel.
This facet of
Pearl’s craft reaches a jaw-dropping peak in a passage late on in the work. The
poet-investigators chase after one of the “printer’s devils” in the dead of
winter, across a frozen lake. The scene of Lowell grabbing the nearly-submerged
“devil” by his curly red locks and demanding explanation brings the 9th circle
of hell possibly more vividly to life than Dante did himself, as it is a
palimpsest of not only several related scenes in Inferno but the Boston scene
as well. The union of all the references and implications in the context of the
narrative left me frankly queasy with admiration. Pearl has tried to
disambiguate by introducing this particular point in Dante’s narrative just
before the incident (there is, literally, a lecture on it), and it is followed
up shortly after by another, even plainer rendering on the same theme.
Hopefully non-Danteans will pick up on the superficial reference, but I fear a
great deal of the force of the words will melt unless aided by a little more
knowledge. Pearl himself is a kind of opposite to Patrolman Rey, who hears a
piece of Dante quoted to him but cannot understand it, only endure the
apprehension of knowing its grave importance. “He remembered the whisperer’s
grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but
was without the power to repeat any of them.” Pearl by contrast cannot help but
repeat them, through the medium of his story.
This extreme
marriage between the two texts, or rather the bond between Pearl himself and the
text of the Comedia (for his work on which he won the 1998 Dante Prize from the
Dante Society of America) is perhaps more apparent than even the author
realises. Pearl’s prose is without exception polished, educated and perfectly
presented. However it is always in the scenes that refer (in whatever way) back
to Dante that are extraordinary in their skill. If you don’t know your Dante,
it’s a very accurate way of guessing which parts are alluding to Inferno. If
you read a sentence and think “wow that’s vivid” or “what a strange way to put
things” – it’s probably echoing Dante. This is not in any way to belittle
Pearl’s own words or to suggest excessive reliance on another work. It is
merely very evident that the true inspiration for the work are the words of
Dante, and it is these that ignite Pearl’s own words as if suddenly doused in
petrol when they hit the page with the force of his empathy.
For anyone
unfamiliar with Inferno, here are some brief pointers (much more is explained
within the book). Dante is journeying through Hell on a sort of tourist visa,
and passes through the ante-hell and nine circles of it, which are arranged
according to the punishments awarded various types of sinners. The outer
circles are for lesser sins, the ninth circle is reserved for traitors and
Satan himself, along with Judas Iscariot. In The Dante Club, by a certain
arbitrary process only some of the circles are dealt with. Unfortunately,
detailing the sins and their punishments here would only spoil (both) books for
the reader. It will have to suffice to compare yet another Dante-related work:
Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Milton tries to “justify the ways of God to Man,”
and Dante might be said on some level to justify the ways of Man to God, Pearl
is perhaps trying to justify the ways of Man to Man. The question: what can
turn decent people into unspeakable torturers, is one that is as pertinent to
this day as it was in the 14th century, and will continue to be so long after
we are gone.
(First published in
Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)
