Published 2017
“On the day of the new president’s inauguration, when we worried that he might be murdered as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crwods, and when so many of us were close to economic ruin in the aftermath of the bursting of the mortgage bubble, and when Isis was still an Egyptian mother-goddess, an uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country arrived in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile, behaving as if nothing was wrong with the country or the world or his own story.”
So begins Salmon Rushdie’s latest novel, and it continues in like manner throughout the book, weaving the story of Nero Golden and his three sons, Petya, Apu, and D (for Dionysus) who have left their home in India for a mansion in New York City, with current events including a change in administration at the end of the above mentioned president’s two terms. Our narrator, Rene’, lives with his academic, left-leaning parents in Greenwich Village and becomes friendly, and in some cases, intimate with the Goldens while he pursues a career in documentary film making. Much of what we see is framed by the author in screen shots he hopes to create at some point later on. Of course the names are all fictitious but it takes several chapters to understand why they have changed them and left or fled their home country. Shady doesn’t seem to be quite the right word for Nero Golden, yet he is very human in his love for his sons.
This book is a good read. Salmon Rushdie as usual, is ‘out there’ with his comments on current events and telling it as he sees it.
New York City
The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury
Published 2005
Since the publication of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, any book mentioning the Knights Templar is bound to intrigue. The story begins with the fall of Acre and the Templar’s last stand in the holy city in 1291. A band of knights escapes from the battle carrying a small chest wrapped in velvet, its contents a well-kept secret, even from all but a few of the Templars themselves. They make their way to the Falcon Temple, a galley ship waiting in the harbor.
Moving forward to the 21st century, four horsemen dressed as Templars ride out of Central Park and into, literally, the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, guns blazing, still astride their horses, they steal several of the items on display at a special showing of Treasures of the Vatican. Witnessing the theft of an unusual object from behind untouched exhibits, Tess Chaykin, is terrified. After the fact, and reunited with her daughter and mother, who had been in the ladies’ room during the commotion, Tess is intrigued. The daughter of a well-known archeologist, and a trained archeologist herself Tess begins to wonder why this particular object was taken.
Sean Reilly is the FBI agent in charge of the investigation. When he questions Tess regarding the incident he realizes that she is holding back something, but doesn’t know what. Tess calls on experts she knows in the field and discovers that the object taken from the exhibit was an encoder, an ingenious device which the Templars used to code messages making them indecipherable to anyone else, even within the Catholic Church. What she and Reilly find out later is that one of the horsemen has discovered one of these messages and needs the device to break the code. Meanwhile the other three horsemen are dropping dead like flies, presumably killed by their leader.
The story continues to flash back to the events immediately after the knight’s escape from Jerusalem in 1291, the path of a small band of knights, the sinking of the Falcon Temple during a storm, the enigmatic reason behind the Knight Templar’s rise to power and subsequent fall. Tess and Reilly, for different reasons, try to stay a step ahead of the lone horseman’s quest to unearth the mysteries of that last ill-fated journey out of the holy land.