"Ex-Libris" by Ross King

Isaac Inchbold, a book-seller, becomes involved in the hunt for a rare manuscript in the early days of the reign of Charles II. His story is interwoven with that of Emilia, maid-in-waiting to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia in the 1620s who, with Sir Ambrose Pennington and a Czech librarian, flees with the manuscript from Prague to London, pursued by three mysterious men.

This is a superbly researched historical thriller whose huge amounts of detail add much-needed verisimilitude to a plot that ranges from cryptography to Rosicrucianism to Sir Walter Ralegh's search for El Dorado. Although the Isaac Inchbold plot is more or less credible, with Isaac wandering around London and South East England in search of clues to this manuscript, the 1620s plot in which three characters are pursued by three extraordinarily sinister characters who never quite catch up with them is very repetitive and seems designed principally for the regular cliff-hangers that it produces. The protagonist asks, quite late on in the book, "How could a manuscript of fourteen pages – a few scraps of goatskin scribbled with a mixture of lampblack and vegetable gum – possibly be valuable enough for someone to kill for?" (3.2) and it is a question which more or less gets answered (before a cataclysmic ending worthy of Poe) but it is the fact that the pursuers are both so sinister yet repeatedly fail that I found far-fetched. That and the shipwreck in which all three protagonists and all three mysterious antagonists survive but almost no other 'bit part' despite the fact that the bit parts were all experienced sailors: that forfeited credibility.

Nevertheless, the author has a wonderful gift for description. The main character is memorably described as "a small man with dark garb and the morose, worried eyes of a puffin." (3.4) Other original descriptions, which are utterly of their period, include:

• "I closed my eyes, and sleep, with its heavy die, pressed its seal across their lids." (1.4)
• "The coach forded the thin stream, its wheels tossing curtains of water to either side." (1.7)
• "after much truffling in one of the cupboards, presented me with a fat volume," (2.13)
• "The walls of the corridor were lined with busts and marble figures like the ones in the garden of Arundel House, their ancient noses and lips obliterated like those of syphilitics." (3.5)
• "He was on his haunches beside the cabinet, grunting and red-faced like someone at his close-stool." (3.5)

Other wonderful moments during the book: included:

• "It is easier to find a labyrinth, writes Comenius, than a guiding path. Yet every labyrinth is a circle that begins where it ends, as Boethius tells us, and ends where it begins." (1.1)
• "these books were doomed. This wasn’t a library so much as a charnel-house." (1.3)
• "Quite amazing how determined kings and emperors have been to destroy books. But civilisation is built on such desecrations, is it not? Justinian the Great burned all of the Greek scrolls in Constantinople after he codified the Roman law and drove the Ostrogoths from Italy. And Shih Huang Ti, the first Emperor of China, the man who unified the five kingdoms and built the Great Wall, decreed that every book written before he was born should be destroyed." (1.3)
• "fifty years ago the great Isaac Casaubon had demonstrated how the entire Corpus hermeticum – this supposed fountainhead of the world’s most ancient magic and wisdom – was nothing more than a fraud, the invention of a handful of Greek scholars living in Alexandria at some time in the century after Christ." (1.7)
• "hundreds of documents inscribed in bizarre codes composed of astrological signs and other chicken-scratchings" (2.2)
• "Trust, after all, is the mother of deceit." (2.9)
• "where he urged me to sample a new beverage called ‘rumbullion’, or ‘rum’ for short. It was a hellish fluid that seemed to scald the gullet and cloud the brain." (2.11)
• "I knew, of course, that greed was essential to a lawyer’s craft," (3.4)
• "Learning was no longer being used for the improvement of the world: it had become instead the handmaid of prejudice and orthodoxy, and prejudice and orthodoxy the handmaids of slaughter." (Epilogue)

Beautifully written but a disappointing plot.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Ross King is a brilliant historian of art who has written, among other books:

• Brunelleschi's Dome
• Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
• Leonardo and the Last Supper
• The Judgement of Paris