Monday, March 26, 2007

Book Review: "The Egyptologist"

I seem to be in an epistolary novel phase at the moment for my fiction reading (is it odd that I didn't realize that until about the fifth one in a row?). Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist is the latest, and one I've enjoyed over the course of my recent commutes.

With several different narrators speaking from different time periods about vaguely contemporaneous events, this one can get a bit tricky to follow at times. Phillips has created a fascinatingly deluded amateur archaeologist (RM Trilipush), whose adventures we follow right through to the bitter end ... and I do mean bitter end. And then there's the Australian detective pursuing Trilipush, but he's retelling the story thirty years later. So the fog of mystery never quite lifts, and while I guessed one of the plot twists about halfway through the book, I can honestly say I never expected it to end as it did.

An odd book, but well done.