Review: The Cabinet of Curiosities

“PRESTON, Lincoln”, The Cabinet of Curiosities, HarperCollins Publishers Pty. Ltd., Pymble, NSW, Australia, 2003.

Octavo; paperback; 464pp. Rolled; mild wear to the covers; spine creased; text block edges toned. Good.

Whenever I want to snuggle down for a comfy evening, my movie of choice is “The Relic”. As I’ve said before, it’s a well-written flick that benefits from having a solid architecture. The performances vary considerably but I’m prepared to overlook a lot for the sake of a film that puts substance before spectacle. I’ve never been able to find a copy of the book that this film was based on but I’ve met a fellow fan and Scott has kindly lent me a copy of The Cabinet of Curiosities by Lincoln Preston and I’m now getting an insight into the very genome behind “The Relic’s” phenotype.

Let me just reveal an interesting factoid before we continue: ‘Lincoln Preston’ is not a single individual; it’s two authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child writing as one. The ability to do this has always intrigued me: a collaborative effort requires a lot of give and take and I’m not sure that I could work with someone else to successfully pull something like this off. I’ve had opportunities (which unfortunately came to nothing early on) and I’d like to think that I’m open to the creative process, but it’s never really happened. So, kudos to these two guys for making a go of it! (I’m wondering how they decided whose name would go first...?)

As is typical in transferring any printed story to celluloid, there are excesses which get trimmed. One of these is an FBI investigator called Pendergast who is just too corny to be true. The other is an annoying reporter called Smithback who is a consummate knob. My discussions with Scott inform me that they’re both in the print version of The Relic and I’m so glad they were relegated. Nevertheless, here they both are in Cabinet and I’m having to deal with them...

Pendergast is that worst type of fictional literary character – a tricked-out blank slate ready for anything to be assigned to it. On the one hand, he’s glaringly obvious – white skin, hair, and eyes, in a black suit, driving a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith in New York (!) – but we never know anything about him. Why the hell doesn’t one of the other characters call FBI headquarters and get an explanation as to what he’s doing?! Because that would be too easy and the authors don’t want us to go there. He’s just too cool for school and he grates – he has the inside track on everything and he never tells anyone anything. Frankly, if I was one of the other characters in this tale I’d tell him where to get off: people like this don’t exist, and I wonder what made the authors think he was a good idea?

In detective fiction, many authors assemble their chief sleuth from a range of tics and mannerisms which they feel their readership will find interesting: Poirot has a symmetry issue; Alleyne has a name which no-one can pronounce; Campion is a pair of spectacles in front of a myriad bizarre twitches that leave him barely human. Generally, these extremes calm down into something workable after a few turns around the block. Not so Agent Pendergast: he’s a non-albino albino in a black suit with a hatred of bureaucracy, and yet working for a Bureau, who always seems to know what’s going on while no-one else has a clue. His metatextual premise is shaky and it’s easy to see why he got the chop.

On the other hand the reporter is a complete buffoon. Each time he uses his ‘journalism powers’ he gets nowhere; whenever he climbs over, or up, something to access information he sends everything pear-shaped. While he is referenced as a major player in the novel version of “The Relic”, he’s a walking target in this story: his journalistic strivings earn him the hatred of his girlfriend, his boss, his fellow journalists, the public at large, and they finally get him (almost) killed.

What that leaves us with is a story remarkably similar to “The Relic”. It’s set in a natural history museum; there are a bunch of scientists competing for a very small pool of funding in an institution increasingly focussed upon box-office draw; there is a female scientist annoyed at the fact of her life’s work being sidelined by cash-flow issues; there is Victorian-era architecture facilitating present-day mayhem. I hate to say it, but Lincoln Preston seems to be a one-trick pony at bottom. They manifest some interesting premises but they all seem to be overlain on the same fundamental substrate.

Nevertheless, there is some fascinating research on view. The Victorian notion of ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ – private collections of natural history material amassed by gentlemen collectors without formal education (for the most part) – is quite interesting, along with the notion that these collections were all bought up by the Natural History Museum of New York after that free institution was established. The parade of freaks and curiosities lends a pleasing tone to the narrative.

However. The Relic is a story about a monster loose in a museum. The Cabinet of Curiosities is a story about a serial killer loose in a museum. There’s a pattern here - same-old, same-old - but one which the authors nevertheless utilise well.

What bothers me is that between The Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities is another novel – The Reliquary. Surely they can’t do the same gag three times? From what I’ve been able to ascertain, I’m thinking that maybe they can. And that they did. Maybe it’s because we all live in an era where readers don’t want ‘new’ as opposed to ‘more’; ‘new’ Poirot tales are being written (despite the fact that Agatha Christie killed him off so that there would be no more Poirot). But even if the premise is engaging, to my mind it shouldn’t be used over and over again.

Perhaps this is a case of writing what you know. These guys know museums – how they’re funded, how they’re organised, what makes them tick. They also know human anatomy, since every corpse or other instance of gory revelation is buried beneath a mountain of medical jargon (in a good way!). Reading some of these descriptions, I had a flashback to the movie and the scene with the coroner giving a technical description of the mutilated security guard’s body – she’s my favourite character in the film, by the way. The minutia of technical detail in these descriptions lends a detached and chilly atmosphere to them making them somehow more terrible and thus, more effective.

The Cabinet of Curiosities involves a search for a serial killer who likes to surgically remove the lower spine of his victims while they’re still alive. It transpires that he uses part of the anatomised material to make a substance which – he feels – will indefinitely extend his lifespan with regular applications. As the evidence unfolds, it becomes a distinct possibility that the killer has been at work for about 130 years and isn’t slowing down at all. Our heroes try various methods to try and unearth the criminal – including Pendergast’s ability to ‘super-saturate’ himself with historical facts and mentally recreate in his mind an exact replica of 1890s New York wherein to unearth clues (!) – and almost all of them are successful, whereas the stalwart police force turn up squat. The final chapters are a fevered chase through an eponymous cabinet of curiosities, trying to defeat the killer while not being broken down for parts.

The execution of all this is handled deftly but unimaginatively, plodding through to the bitter conclusion. In a way, the authors shoot themselves in the foot: they want the cops out of the way at the end, and they want the reader constantly guessing who the villain will turn out to be. To this end, they make every policeman and likely candidate for Bad Guy as unpleasant as they can: in the final analysis, I was hoping they’d all die – my sympathies were with nobody. On the heroes’ side, what with the officious FBI cipher and the journalistic no-hoper, the team consists of Dr. Nora Kelly who spends her time being annoyed and cranky, and O’Shaughnessy a New York Irish cop who gets killed. Horribly. This last guy is such a lazy stereotype that it’s embarrassing: no quantity of background characters saying “who’d believe it? An actual Irish New York cop?” can take the curse off this. The irony lies in pointing out the attempt to be ironic.

(As an aside, I’ve noticed that these guys have a trick when sketching out police characters. They make these characters ‘a policeman who...’ In “The Relic”, there are the ‘coffee cops’ – ‘policemen who like lattes’; in this book, there’s O’Shaughnessey, a ‘policeman who likes opera’. See? It’s easy, and almost writes itself...!)

Anyway all of these unlikeable characters wend their tortuous way towards the finale and it’s a relief to be at the end at last. I had flashbacks to Patricia Cornwall – at some point her plots became so insanely and pointlessly byzantine and unbelievable that just turning the page to feel the mechanical effort of moving towards the end was its own reward. Like James Herbert writing ghost stories about ghosts hiring psychic investigators to help them haunt other ghosts, the whole thing just becomes too overwrought and highly-strung. I have the distinct feeling that I’ve come in at the end of a highly developed plot-line and that I’m missing the point – like jumping in to “Game of Thrones” at season six. Although I now realise that it’s going to be just an airport potboiler, I’m still keen to read The Relic; this exercise has shone a light into the inner workings of one of my favourite films but I’m less keen to track my way backwards to The Reliquary. Maybe if I have a day or two with absolutely nothing better to do...

Two Tentacled Horrors (sorry Scott!).