Book Review: The Geographer's Library

My brother recently picked up a novel by Jon Fasman called The Geographer's Library. It's your typical crime/mystery book with a dash of Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracy, except (thankfully) instead of dealing with the oh-so-evil Catholic Church and some maligned religious minority, this book deals with alchemists.

The format of the book is fascinating, if not a bit formulaic, with two parallel storylines that seem entirely different, but eventually converge. One storyline is your basic prose, a gritty mystery novel with a plucky, aimless journalist who stumbles upon the story of a lifetime. Your other is composed of letters and excerpts from other supposed works, describing some of the stories behind mysterious alchemical artifacts. And in the end, these two storylines collide into an incredibly bittersweet and almost depressing ending.

Fasman draws the reader from the beginning in and keeping things just interesting enough to prod him along. The main story somewhat rambles, full of interesting and suspicious characters and colorful allies weaving in and out of the prose. The hero himself is more of an anti-hero, a lost and rambling journalist who has just enough drive and curiousity to find out what happened to a murdered professor, along with naivete that borders on annoying. The alternating chapters between two plots tends to create somewhat slower pace. Some may find this quaint and charming and may need that time to digest all the information presented (and there is a lot), and no doubt the second storyline deepens the plot and mystery even further. But for a reader like me, who is quite impatient, I found myself skipping over them, wanting to find out what happens next.

Even with the slower tempo and breaks between stories, Fasman emphasizes the memoir feel of the novel by putting in little spurs to keep the reader interested. Sentences such as "I didn't want to press what seemed at the time - wrongly, as it turned out - a minor point" remind us that something big is about to happen. And for all the suspense built up, the resolution is somewhat of a letdown. This isn't your usual action thriller, but very much a literary suspense novel to the end. Some violence occurs in the ending, but the protagonist and antagonist, amazingly enough, resolve the conflict with talking.It is a thinking man's book with an ending open for discussion. I would recommend it most definitely for a book club or group reading.