The Dante Club

Read early last year, riveting to the end, a definite page turner


Just finished, dimmed by a loose plot, slow tempo and extraneous detail


Yet to read

I just finish reading The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. I have high hopes for this Poe tale after reading Pearl's debut novel The Dante Club last year. It is such an engrossing read. The lingering magic of the book has sparked my interest in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, especially how the book is parallelled against it. I have read its entirety, the Paradiso, Purgatorio and Inferno.

The Poe Shadow on the other hand has been quite disappointing. I guess the most difficult endeavor for every writer is to live up to the expectations of an earlier success. The Dante Club has been a sensation, so much so the best selling author Dan Brown is cited on the book cover touting "Matthew Pearl is the new shining star of literary fiction...with an immense gift for intricate plots."

The Poe Shadow attempts to solve the mystery surrounding Edgar Allan Poe's death and his last days leading up to it. The fictional character Quentin Clark is an attorney consumed with a desire to pursue the truth of Poe's demise in order to vindicate the slanderous rumors that Poe has died a delirious drunkard. Clark's belief that Poe has modeled the crime solving genius C. Auguste Dupin after a true person takes him to Paris to find the elusive character in Poe's tales.

The story is circuitous with two supposed Dupins going round and round with hypothetical conjectures and Clark endlessly combing through newspaper articles with any mentioning of Poe. This onslaught of facts, dates, places and details makes you wonder where it is heading. Meticulous research has gone behind it but the facts are just too crowded, slowing the tempo of the whole work. The Poe Tale is at best a narration of facts which has neglected the most compelling element of a novel, that of storytelling.

As for The Dante Club the plot structure and tempo is akin to The Da Vinci Code. The story follows a chain of murders mirroring punishments in Hell depicted in Dante's Inferno. Set in nineteenth century Boston, the Dante Club is made up of a circle of famous scholars, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russel Lowell and J.T. Fields.

The success of the book lies in Pearl's ability to flesh up every character, both real and fictional. As opposed to the factual narration in Poe's tale, this is story telling. The urgency to solve the murders is matched with the furious obsession of Longfellow and the Club members to translate the Inferno. The tightness of the plot compels you to piece the puzzle alongside the characters, eavesdropping in Longfellow's study for hunches and clues.

Fictions based on historical facts and real characters are extremely challenging where a fine balance hangs between research and imagination. It behoves to remember that with novels, readers are looking for a good story rather than pure research.