OK, I’ll admit it. I’m a fan of trashy, Dan Brown-style, fiction. Anything with a slightly preposterous plot, involving a murder and/or a conspiracy and I’m in. When I first heard about Sam Bourne, he was sold as “the new Dan Brown!”, or “better than Dan Brown!” Tragically, this was enough to get my attention.
It was only after I picked up his first book that I realised Sam Bourne was the pseudonym of Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. Interesting. Whilst superficially his first four books are very much in the Dan Brown vein (albeit far better written), it was book number three, The Final Reckoning, that made me pay more attention to him. The basic premise of the book, that of a team of avenging Holocaust survivors traveling the world murdering Nazis, is apparently based in fact. This instantly renders the book, and the author, more interesting to me. Fact is always stranger than fiction, and fiction based on fact is surely the strangest of them all.
And so Bourne’s fifth book, Pantheon, appealed to me in the same light. The MacGuffin, a man travelling to America during World War II to search for his family, leads to a larger plot that, again, is based in fact, and makes for fascinating reading, of both the book, and the inevitable Wikipedia trawl afterwards. Sure, the fast-paced page-turning parts of the book are familiar, bordering on formulaic, but I don’t mind that when they’re building towards a bigger picture. It’s the stuff that’s rooted in truth that’s the most fascinating and unsettling.
So yeah, I liked this book. It’s contrived in places and ends poorly, but for a page-turner, it’s perfectly acceptable.
What Did You Do, Ray? 