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The Book of Air and Shadows

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Customer Reviews
Rating:

- A Book of Substance
Who is this guy and how does he know so much about people, Shakespeare, arcane ciphers, and have the ability to spill it all out on a page full of sharp and intelligent prose?

I bought this book because I had read Gruber's voodoo trilogy starting with Tropic of Night. I remember those books for their attention to plot and the depth of the characters caught up in it. The books were fascinating because Gruber's bizarre story lines were driven by the personalities living the story and not the other way around. His characters were not stage props moved back in forth in service of the story. They were the story.

I ordered this book with some trepidation. I am not a big fan of Shakespeare or the Da Vinci Code. The former is to stilted, the latter so formulaic that it should have gone right to a video game to be played on my kid's XBox.

I could not have been more pleasantly surprised. From the first sentence to the last, the people in this book, all of them, dead or alive, speak to you. They invite you to sit in the drawing room of their dreams, good and bad, and listen. And you do at great benefit
to a plot that moves along as a result of those dreams.

Every character in this book could have been a cliche. None of them are. As a consequence, the plot, involving a missing Shakepeare play, is not. That is the difference between this book and the Da Vinci Code.

I will miss Mishkin, Crosetti, and most of all, Carolyn Rolly.

Here is a point of reference. Think of Thomas Cook collaborating with Robert Ludlam.

Rating:

- Literary thriller trumps Da Vinci Code
Literary thriller of the type popular since The Da Vinci Code (and much better done, by the way, than that oversold, underwritten mediocrity), Gruber posits a newly-discovered letter by a contemporary of William Shakespeare that refers to ciphered letters detailing spying on Shakespeare's life and a potentially extant manuscript of a previously-unknown play.

Of course, there are questions about the verity of the letter (a Shakespeare scholar previously duped by a similar fraud plays a prominent role), the existence and verity of the ciphered spy letters, and most of all the play manuscript. Gruber maintains this tension nearly to the last page of the book, not an easy feat when weaving together the different threads of the story while keeping the reader interested and the story hurdling forward.

The book includes its share of cliches including simpering literary homosexuals, fast-living wealthy New Yorkers, and Russian gangsters, but to Gruber's credit he plays the story for laughs when it needs it and makes the stereotypes plausible.

Rating:

- Complex and engaging
I've noticed a wide variety of opinions posted about this book so I felt compelled to weigh in. I found it to be an engrossing tale that weaves together the stories of characters from Elizabethan England and contemporary New York with a terrific command of narrative and suspense.

I very much appreciated the author's ability to evoke the very different atmospheres of these very different places while introducing a wide array of characters and subplots. It's the sort of book that you can get lost in, almost like a good Victorian novel with many interconnected layers. I see that several people have likened the book to The DaVinci Code, but I actually found it more similar to A.S. Byatt's "Possession," with which it shares a literary focus (e.g., Shakespeare) and also a back-and-forth structure between Elizabethan and contemporary stories.

I definitely recommend the book for anyone who enjoys Byatt or historical mysteries.

Rating:

- Sophomoric
Good story lost in the over emphasis on sex. Wouldn't buy another of his books.

Rating:

- Save your money and time
Page 93. That's as far as I was willing to waste any more time waiting for this book to get to be worth reading.

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