Reading Roundup: A Tomb Ado

Eye panel on the coffin of Khnumnakht, c. 1850-1750 B.C.E. Public domain photo c/o the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I read a classic (but mediocre) novel about Egyptology so then I had to reread an underrated (but ingenious) novel about Egyptology!

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Jewel of Seven Stars probably wouldn’t be remembered except by aficionados of mummy-themed horror stories, and certainly wouldn’t have a Penguin Classics edition, if it weren’t by the author of Dracula . There are some interesting ideas and the potential for an enjoyable Edwardian horror/adventure novel here, but Bram Stoker consistently takes it in boring or baffling directions.

The biggest problem is that there’s very little character development and the narrator is a nonentity. He doesn’t do anything that couldn’t have been done equally well by some other character in the novel, aside from being the “hero” of the book’s insipid love story. (When the heroine’s father wakes from a four-day trance induced by the mummy’s astrally-projected spirit, the narrator’s first reaction is to say “So, I’m madly in love with your daughter after meeting her a week ago, can I propose to her?” rather than “tell me everything you know about this mummy that almost killed you!”) I mean, it’s been a while since I read Dracula, but I feel like its characters generally behave the way reasonable people would if they encountered an ancient vampire. But the characters in Jewel of Seven Stars just behave in inexplicable ways, even accounting for the fact that people in 1903 would not necessarily have been Genre Savvy about cursed-mummy horror stories.

I read the Penguin Classics edition, which features the original 1903 “downer” ending and includes the 1912 “happy” ending as an appendix. While the “happy” ending could be more accurately called the “incredibly anticlimactic” ending, the “downer” ending is unsatisfactory too: not because it’s bleak, but because there are still too many loose ends and unanswered questions. There’s a lot of Egyptian mumbo-jumbo in these pages but it never coheres into a consistent system of magic. Or, if coherent world-building was too difficult, Stoker could have spent more time on character development and psychological horror. There are plenty of possibilities for that with the character of Margaret (highlight to reveal spoiler-ish bit): after all, she is a Nice English Girl who gets possessed by the spirit of an ancient female pharaoh. (I think? One of the aforementioned loose ends is that the novel doesn’t quite define the nature of the psychological tie between Margaret and Queen Tera.) But because we see Margaret only through the eyes of her besotted suitor, the richer ambiguities of her character go unexplored.

Finally, in today’s edition of Plot Points that Hit Differently After You’ve Lived Through a Respiratory Pandemic: I was very amused that the characters are able to (somewhat) protect themselves from the mummy’s influence by wearing respirator masks!

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Egyptologist knows how to hook you. On page 10, a retired detective promises he’ll reveal the full story of one of the strangest cases of his career, something that “started as an odd-duck inheritance case, then became a missing-person case with a dozen different clients, then a double murder, a prenuptial background investigation, then a debt-collection case, and suddenly quite a different double murder”. The fun of the novel is in learning exactly what the detective meant by that… and exactly how he got it all wrong. Because this is a novel of unreliable narrators, told in letters and diaries that always have a hidden agenda, with intrigue that spans four continents and three decades—or four millennia, considering that the main character is a 1920s Egyptologist seeking the tomb of an obscure king who (may have) lived around 1650 BC. It requires you to read between the lines for a story that’s even more bizarre than our dogged detective could imagine.

Maybe the most surprising thing about The Egyptologist is how dark it eventually gets—for all its humor and playfulness, it’s also a story about a desperate man slowly losing his mind. Though nothing supernatural is involved, I found the conclusion of this book way more shocking and disturbing than any “spooky cursed mummy” horror story.

I really like Arthur Phillips’ novels but they all seem to have quite low average ratings on Goodreads. I guess they’re an acquired taste, or that other people have a different threshold between “enjoyably clever” and “annoyingly clever” than I do. Because this book definitely wants to impress you with its cleverness, its wordplay and twisty plot and unreliable narrators and fragments of pastiche. There are plenty of Easter eggs: the protagonist’s name is an anagram of the author’s; the female love interest has the same first name as the female love interest in the classic Egyptology novel The Jewel of Seven Stars . And can it really be a coincidence that Atum-Hadu, the name of the pharaoh at the center of the mystery, sounds like “a tomb ado”? I love this type of thing, but I can see how some readers might find it irritating and self-indulgent.

But Phillips, in his cleverness, has anticipated that objection too: as he reminds us frequently throughout The Egyptologist, the ancient Egyptians believed that the archetypal act of creation was an act of masturbation.