A wonder, page by page

Vikrant Parmar

Escaping into the maze of an incognito life is sometimes fraught with riddles that one least expects. As happens with the protagonist of author Charlie Lovett’s novel, The Bookman’s Tale, Peter Byerly. The antiquarian bookseller moves from North Carolina, US, to the quaint English countryside to bury memories of his deceased wife Amanda — who in life and ‘after-life’ believed her husband wanted ‘to find a book that would change literary history’ — in the womb of rare books.

At a sleepy bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, while flipping through the pages of an 18th century book on William Shakespeare’s forgeries, Peter chances upon a Victorian portrait strikingly similar to his late wife. The uncanny resemblance ignites curiosity in a man who otherwise resorts to anti-anxiety pills under the slightest of duress. Although Peter is sure the portrait is not that of his wife, he decides to track down the origins. And then, opens a Pandora’s Box of intrigue, trickery, forgery, deceit, revenge, feud, blackmail and murder. On the lookout for the life of a mourning book-buried recluse, Peter, along with his newfound love interest Liz Sutcliffe, is catapulted into the eye of a storm that ends at the barrel of a gun. Peter is embroiled in the murder of another book-lover, the old Graham Sykes, while he is out to discover ‘real’ facts about Robert Greene’s long-lost text Pandosto — on which Shakespeare had based his play The Winter’s Tale — and its successive owners. The search is quintessential, a veritable reprieve from the quagmire of circumstances that Peter finds himself in.

The story meanders through the fantastical world of underground crypts, alcoves, secret doors and passage-ways. It moves back in time to an era where the ‘real’ William Shakespeare converses with his compeers and where aspersions are cast on his originality as well as credentials. ‘The stage makes us all what we are not,’ says the Bard of Avon as a character — a refreshing narrative stroke from Lovett. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Robert Greene and other literary luminaries make an appearance as characters, something which becomes wholesome food for the imagination. Weaved in between all this is love, emotion, tenderness and togetherness. Having begun in sleepy lanes, the narrative suddenly picks up breakneck speed in typical Dan Brown fashion as Peter and Liz delve deep into the crypt of a tombstone from where a ‘dark’ staircase leads to ultimate illumination.

The author’s language is sedate and charming. The time-shifts are fantastic, well-researched and extremely well-executed. Romance has dexterously been weaved into the overall tapestry of mystery and revenge. Plots and sub-plots combine with effortless ease, even as rare books form the overall canopy. Charlie Lovett, a former bookseller himself, has doled out the choicest of words from his repertoire in The Bookman’s Tale — a literary creation that indeed deserves applause, a lot of it.