The Gospel truth: books within books

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Orhan Pamuk's narrator, a miniaturist in 16th century Istanbul in My Name is Red, whispers to us, his audience: "I shudder in delight when I think of two-hundred-year-old books, dating back to the time of Tamerlane, volumes for which acquisitive giaours gleefully relinquish gold pieces and which they carry all the way back to their own countries. Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?"

In the world of codexes, manuscripts, palimpsests and papyri, of old forgotten illuminated texts and crytopgraphic challenges from some ancient century, the life of a book is a frail thing. Some disappear for years.

Some descend into the pigeonholes of libraries; some are burnt or lost or crumble without ever yielding up their secrets; some lie underground waiting to be discovered. And increasingly often these days, some find a second lease of life in the oddest sort of way: within the pages of a contemporary book.

In Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the plot turns on Brown's interpretation of the "Gnostic Gospels", the so-called lost books of the Bible. The Gospel of Thomas is the best regarded of these "" the rest includes such "gospels" as the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth "" but their authenticity is considered highly questionable by many Bible scholars.

Brown says the research he did for the book convinced him that the lost or gnostic gospels were accurate and had been suppressed in what one of his characters calls "the greatest cover-up in human history".

He believes firmly that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and much of The Da Vinci Code hardsells this version of the truth in the veil of a literary mystery.

If the Gnostic Gospels are fiercely disputed, so is the curious manuscript called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason were students at Princeton when Caldwell presented a paper on this obscure 1499 Italian text, which was first translated into English only in 1999. The book contains a plethora of secret codes, most of which have not been cracked yet.

They even disagree over the identity of the author, though a cipher embedded in the text uses letters to form the Latin message "Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit", meaning "Brother Francesco Colonna Loved Polia Tremendously". (Polia is the main female character in the Hypnerotomachia.)

It's a very strange text, written in a mishmash of languages, rambling, with an author who confesses among other things a distinctly non-platonic love for buildings! Caldwell and Thomason had intended to write an intellectual suspense thriller anyway; the Hypnerotomachia served as the perfect starting point. The book they came up with is The Rule of Four, which I'd describe as the thinking person's Da Vinci Code.

If this reminds you of Umberto Eco and The Name of the Rose, it should: every present-day crafter of highbrow literary mysteries genuflects to that 1980 classic. Eco added in jokes in plenty: the blind librarian at the monastery where monks are being done in is called Jorge de Burgos, in tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, but his chief feat was an act of breathtaking literary audacity.

He invented a missing manuscript and no ordinary one at that "" Aristotle's second book of Poetics, the treatise on comedy! At the end of the novel, the library and monastery are engulfed in a fire; but Eco left the fate of Aristotle's manuscript open-ended.

One of the conceits of Borges' imaginary library, alluded to by Eco in many of his works, is the impossibility of building a library that contains every book in the world. There's a virtual attempt at doing something similar which has been running for quite a while now. The late Douglas Adams created the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, conceived as a complete reference guide, a Lonely Planet on steroids turned Lonely Universe.

Before he died, he set up an eponymous website: www.h2g2.com. It's not the most complete encyclopaedia available "" a complete encyclopaedia which would have to include everything including itself wanders into Borgesian territory best left unexplored.

One of the murkiest books to find its way into another is the Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, an apocryphal work that shows up in Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. This novel is billed as a literary mystery, but it's actually a paean to the world of rare books and obscure manuscripts masquerading as a thriller.

The Book of the Nine Doors is rumoured to contain the secret formula for summoning up the devil "" but this is hidden in three different copies of the book.

The illustrations for the Book of the Nine Doors have an incredible pedigree "" they are supposed to have been commissioned by Lucifer himself, and were first seen in what is called the oldest book in the world "" the Delomelanicon.

Perez-Reverte mixed real and imaginary manuscripts so cleverly that some readers were left confused; until The Rule of Four came out, in fact, several assumed that the Hypnerotomachia was a Perez-Reverte invention!

And in some cases, an invented book takes on a life of its own. In the early 1920s, H P Lovecraft made several references in his stories to a book called the Necronomicon, apparently the work of a devout Muslim called Abdul Alhazred, also known as Mad Abdul. Over the years, Lovecraft explained that while he had "quoted" from the book, it was an invention.

In 1934, he wrote to William Frederick Anger: "Regarding the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred-I must confess that both the evil volume & the accursed author are fictitious creatures of my own-as are the malign entities of Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, &c. For the fun of building up a convincing cycle of synthetic folklore, all of our gang frequently allude to the pet daemons of the others-thus [Clark Ashton] Smith uses my Yog-Sothoth, while I use his Tsathoggua.

...Thus our black pantheon acquires an extensive publicity & pseudo-authoritativeness it would not otherwise get. We never, however, try to put it across as an actual hoax; but always carefully explain to enquirers that it is 100% fiction."

This was very helpful to me personally: it clarified the puzzling question of why my partner invokes Yog-Sothoth in times of great emotion, and allays fears that he might be a secret demon-worshipper.

Thousands of readers still believe that such a book exists, and that there was indeed a mad Abdul, despite all Lovecraft's protestations from the grave. Some books never die. Even if they'd never lived.

nilroy@lycos.com