Open Secret
Now in a new Thai translation, an international best-seller comes home
- Published: 20/06/2010 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Spectrum
Tom Knox's The Genesis Secret, despite its interwoven British and Turkish storylines and broad international appeal, was written in a hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 8. That doesn't imply the thriller was the product of a sightseeing tourist or expat's frenzy of inspiration; it was a carefully considered, formulaically crafted marketing product.
OPPORTUNITY KNOX: Author Tom Knox with the Thai translation of ‘The Genesis Secret’, at the recent Bangkok International Book Fair. PHOTO: EZRA
The book opens with Rob Lutrell, a British journalist frazzled by covering Baghdad, sent to Eastern Turkey on what his editor assumes will be a peaceful assignment, to cover the archaeological dig at Gobekli Tepe, 12,000-year-old ruins of what could be the historical site of the Garden of Eden. Something happened at the site around 8,000BC and it was deliberately buried, preserving the remains for today's archaeologists to puzzle over.
When the head archaeologist dies in an accident that looks suspiciously like murder, Rob is drawn into a mystery whose scope keeps expanding. Together with a French academic and romantic interest, Christine, he investigates a secretive, possibly Satan-worshipping local sect, the Yezidi, on a journey that takes him to Iraq, Istanbul, back home and through the history of child sacrifice.
Meanwhile, in the book's other thread, DC Mark Forrester investigates a series of grisly crimes across Britain and Ireland. A band of youths is pulling off a string of cruel murders involving various elements of ritual sacrifice - dismemberment, flaying, burial, beheading, boiling intestines, breaking the spinal column and flipping the lungs over the shoulders - all begun while the victims are still alive.
The leader of this group, Jamie Cloncurry, is outrageously wealthy, hyper-intelligent, bloodthirsty and cruel - all the implausible elements that comprise so many thriller villains. Racist, sexist and paranoid, Cloncurry is trying to emulate the historical Hellfire Club, an 18th-century British and Irish collective of high-society rakes with the motto "Do what thou wilt".
THE GENESIS SECRET: Available from all good bookshops for 245 baht (Thai) and 506 baht (English).
Lutrell and Cloncurry find themselves in a race to discover the meaning of the Gobekli Tepe, the Yezidi's sacred Black Book and what actually happened in the Garden of Eden.
There is much that is interesting, even fascinating in The Genesis Secret; the Hellfire Club, the Fertile Crescent cults and locations are all real or based on historical fact. The Gobekli Tepe especially is an absorbing site that could have great implications for our understanding of human history, especially the decline of hunter-gathering and counter-intuitive shift to agriculture. How these elements interweave to form a narrative, though, is more a feat of formula manipulation and engineering than a literary achievement.
The popular success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in 2003 - despite critical apathy - caused many changes in the publishing industry. It would be unfair to characterise The Genesis Secret as an imitation, but without Da Vinci's success this book almost certainly wouldn't have been written. For it follows the thriller template that Brown has set in stone - an early murder, interweaving storylines, quick pace, a cliffhanger to end each chapter, ancient puzzles and secrets, romantic sidekick and all the rest.
There is copious use of italics and exclamation marks in Genesis just in case you missed anything. There is no bad language, little sex - but the violence is graphic and gratuitous. As Cloncurry remarks to a victim whose lungs he is about to remove: "Rather lurid, if you don't mind my saying so. But I suppose that's how you accrue sales."
And this book is very much about accruing sales. Tom Knox, the pseudonym of Sean Thomas, during an interview at the Bangkok International Book Fair, admitted to the formulaic aspects of the novel. Even the name "Tom Knox" was designed to be memorable and masculine, he said, to fit alphabetically in the middle of a bookshop's shelves and be more visible. He insisted, though, that the violence was crucial to understanding the story and its theme of horrific child sacrifice.
Perhaps villains like Cloncurry are so implausible in order to keep them safely sanitised, far enough removed from readers that the violence doesn't offend them. The overall result, though, is a book with flat characters with empty ordeals. It's difficult to join in mourning Forrester's loss of his daughter, or Lutrell's panic at the possibility of losing his, because they are pieces of a template rather than flesh-and-blood characters who come alive on the pages.
In Thai translation or in the original English, this is simply another fast-paced thriller with the requisite twists and turns, implausible coincidences, a disappointing deus ex machina resolution and a "secret" that is just plain silly.
About the author
- Writer: Ezra
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