“The Bookman’s Tale: A Novel of Obsession”
Author: Charlie Lovett
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 352
Price: $27.95 (Cloth)
The title of “The Bookman’s Tale” is meant, I think, to remind one of Chaucer: “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” etc. It sets an appropriately antiquarian mood, and much of this novel deals with the antiquarian, the rare and antique.
The protagonist, Peter Byerly, is a bright, shy young fellow. We first meet him in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, perhaps the most famous town for used bookstores in all the world. Peter is a bookman, a bookseller, not a book store owner, and not exactly a book collector or a book critic. He is devoted to the objects themselves as works of art and historical importance, and his passion is to find and buy rare books, preferably culturally significant ones, to save them from possible destruction by rot, insects, and so on, and then to sell them to collectors, usually specialists in some field or other, like Renaissance drama or Victorian memoir, who will treasure them.
On February 15, 1995, Peter opens a volume on book forgery published in the mid-nineteenth century and out tumbles a small (4” x 4”), exquisite, 100-year-old watercolor of the face of his wife, Amanda, from whose death nine months ago Peter is still very slowly recovering. How can this be? The watercolor is signed “B.B.” Who is that?
The mystery must be solved. Peter will investigate. Is this a coincidence, or a cruel joke?
The reader then accompanies Peter on his search for the answer, and this search has many of the elements of a Dan Brown, “Da Vinci Code”-type novel.
But first, there is the love story.
Peter, from a poor, small, dysfunctional North Carolina family—drunk father and vulgar mother—is a sophomore on scholarship at prestigious Ridgefield University. The Ridgefield family, the main supporters of the university, we are told, “had become impressively wealthy in tobacco, then excessively wealthy in textiles, and now obscenely wealthy in banking.” (I thought of Duke). Peter is a work-study student in the library. There he sees and falls in love with Amanda, whom he notices for her slimness, poise, excellent posture, and, eventually, her beauty. Each day Amanda reads from 2-6 p.m., and Peter, working, steals glances. She notices of course and they begin an innocent relationship during which he is slower even than the reader to realize that the Amanda Devereaux rare book room is named after her grandmother, and that she is one of THE Ridgefields, and worth 20 million dollars.
Unlike the conflict in THE “Love Story” by Erich Segal, her rich family likes Peter and soon becomes his family as well.
This may seem sentimental, but I did not find it so. Their chaste, playful, slowly maturing courtship was pleasing in the extreme.
Although it is not practical information, like the once-ubiquitous inclusion of recipes in novels, one learns a lot about the rare book business and, more specifically, book restoration. For the perfect birthday gift Peter restores for Amanda a broken, tattered copy of “At the Back of the North Wind,” an 1870 fantasy novel with illustrations by Pre-Raphaelite follower Arthur Hughes. Peter unbinds the old book, resews the signatures, and then rebinds it with endpapers of blue, white and gold marbled swirls and expensive blue leather with gilt lettering. It makes you want to march right down to the book arts program and learn how to do this.
Yes, Amanda loves it.
But, there’s more. This story takes place in four different centuries.
In London in 1592 Bartholomew Harbottle loans a book, “Pandosto,” by Robert Greene to the playwright William Shakespeare. We think it comes back to Harbottle with marginalia by Shakespeare, who has used it as a source for “A Winter’s Tale,” perhaps modeling the character Autolycus, “a comic rogue,” on Harbottle.
While searching for the identity of the artist “B.B.,” Peter comes into possession of this book and becomes enmeshed in the late-twentieth-century chapter of a mid-Victorian blood feud between the residents of Evenlode House and neighboring Evenlode Manor, in Cornwall. His involvement nearly gets him killed, but as he traces the provenance of Greene’s “Pandosto,” the plot thickens nicely with chases and escapes, murders and attempted murders, robberies, forgeries and fake forgeries, crypts and secret tunnels, and the possibility that Peter may have discovered the Holy Grail of all serious bookmen: proof that Shakespeare did or did not write the plays of Shakespeare.
He also meets and shares adventures with the lovely Liz Sutcliffe, an expert on nineteenth-century watercolors.