Codex, by Lev Grossman
1.0 Stars
12-7-2021

This was a superficially normal thriller/mystery, about an investment banker between jobs who has been hired to look for an ancient and possibly mythical book inside a forgotten library. This normal story is then paired with more high-brow literary attempts at adding various meta-textual strands to the story. Unfortunately, none of it works. The story is terrible as a thriller, and it is terrible at trying to do anything new or clever with the meta-text. My assumption is that big-brain Grossman saw the massive success of Dan Brown's **The Da Vinci Code**, thought that he could easily duplicate that low-brow book and rake in the cash, and then completely failed. It's not so easy when you're in the driver's seat!

So, in more detail. The first thing you notice about the book is that basically nothing interesting happens in the first 100 pages. A bold choice. Also, most of the characters in the book range between asshole, cringy, or unmanic pixie dream girl. So that does not help. Later on in the book more interesting possibilities open up, and then absolutely none of them pay off:

E.g. 1) there is an adventure-type video game that the main character plays, and at points the adventure in the video game seems to duplicate or rhyme with the adventure that the protagonist is having. And then you pair that up with the object of his search, a book from the 1400's, of which only second hand and incomplete versions exist, and those versions seem in many ways anachronistic? E.g. the old text has odd and varied creatures, characters die and come back and seem to randomly change in motivation, scenes and countries dissolve and reshape, etc. And it kind of sounds like the description you would get if a 1400's person were to see a modern video game (Fortnight?) and then try to describe said video game. So maybe there are time shenanigans going on? Maybe the author of the ancient text is immortal, or prescient, or had contact with a future person or artifact? (Spoiler, none of this is happens). Tying into this theory, the protagonist meets the creator of the video game, a singularly brilliant, monk like, extremely short dude (it was mentioned earlier in the book how short a 1400's Englishman would be) who speaks in a weird accent, like he learned modern English by watching TV. Maybe he is the author of the Codex as well? (Spoiler, no).

E.g. 2) At one point, the protagonist has reached a fail state in the video game, and also seems to be at a dead end in his investigation. This was interesting? Like what if you had a mystery novel where the investigator simply makes the wrong choices and fails to solve the mystery and the novel just disolves around them. And it would explain the poor quality of the novel, as a sort of shambling mis-production that falls further and further apart (e.g. something like like Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading, or the BBC's A Christmas Carol). This does not happen, the investigation gets back on track.

E.g. 3) The protagonist is seeking a book for a rich English Duchess, and apparently the book contains a secret that is extremely relevant to the modern day. The secret turns out to be that the book **implies** that 600 years ago the Duke of Wentworth's ancestor had an affair and a baby with a commoner. Which is just the most underwhelming thing ever, and that nobody would care about in the present day except the most neurotic of nobles.

E.g. 4) The protagonist has no reason to do any of this. Basically he meets the Duchess once, and after that point he is under a Geass/Charm to seek out the book. His actions don't fit with his personality or his position in life, and every time he speaks with the Duchess it's like an electric wire in his brain. So maybe there is something odd going here? E.g. rather than just being bad writing, maybe there is a super natural explanation? Is this book part of The Magicians extended universe? And you do notice that the Duchess and Duke's other servitors have a similarly slavish quality to them. And then, spoiler, no. There is no interesting explanation. This is indeed just bad writing and plotting, where people do idiotic things that are against their character purely to advance the plot.

Final Notes on the novel: don't have sex while committing a robbery!