Codex, by Lev Grossman
Uneven but enjoyable novel about text and reality and stuff
(Review posted 14 May 2005 16:28:45)

A mostly simple story of a young New York investment banker or something caught in a mostly simple web of intrigue involving an ancient book that may or may not exist, and a message that may or may not be hidden in it.

The prose is nothing special, and sometimes gets carried away with itself. The storytelling is a bit dubious, weaving together three strands (the outer story, the story in the lost book, and the story in a computer game) that are probably supposed to reflect and resonate with each other. They sort of do, and it's sort of fun, but no tour de force. The love story is sort of sweet and sort of shallow; it's left unresolved, but not in an unskillful way.

One major sin against a reader, of course, is to use a setting that the reader knows well, and to get it seriously wrong. So, as the sinned-against reader in this case, I get to rant.

The protagonist and the love interest drive from Manhattan to Old Forge, New York. They talk a little, she dozes, but it seems like a pretty quick trip, and they make no stops. In the real New York, though, that's a three hundred mile drive; didn't anyone need a rest room?

Upon arrival, the hero is surprised by the view as he comes around a corner:

He hadn't realized how close they were to the Hudson River. It was the first thing he saw, a broad flat expanse like a lake sparkling far below them down in the valley.

The hero must have real good eyes. I have an old hiking stick that I bought years ago at the hardware store in Old Forge, up in the middle of the Adirondacks, and unless both Google Maps and my memory are quite confused, the Hudson River is at least thirty miles to the east of there, with quite a few streams and lakes and mountains in between.

The whole trip to Old Forge is in fact mostly a tangent in the book; they do find something there, but they could as easily found it in the city. There's a connection between the location and the computer game, but it doesn't really turn out to mean much. If the author just wanted to take his characters for a nice trip into the country (which is a fine thing to do for one's characters), he could at least have gotten the locations right.

(Even in the city, the hero takes the six train once from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and it takes an hour. The real six train doesn't go to Brooklyn at all, and the five train (which does) doesn't take an hour even if you go all the way from 125th street up in Harlem out to Flatbush Avenue at the other end of the line. But maybe the schedules have changed since the book was written.)

But nitpicking rants aside, it was a fun and somewhat diverting book despite its flaws, and probably worth the time.