Reviews
By TOM SHIPPEY
April 8, 2016
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There is a hint of Harry Potter about the start of Jonathan Levi’s immensely ambitious “Septimania” (Overlook Duckworth, 324 pages, $27.95). Its hero, Malory, is a grad student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1978. He is 26 and has never kissed a girl. His thesis about Isaac Newton is going nowhere, and the college is about to evict him. His duties as organ scholar include playing and tuning organs in various churches and chapels, but the one at St. George’s Church stubbornly resists his skills. He is an orphan as well, alone in the world save for a grandmother who never speaks to him.
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Then, as he is checking the organ-pipes on top of the church tower, a young woman appears, Louiza, who has just completed her Ph.D. thesis in the math department on imaginary numbers. Not only does she initiate him into sex, she removes the apple seed that has thwarted his efforts at tuning. As if a blockage has likewise been removed from his own life, Malory further discovers that he is a person of vast importance, the King of Septimania.
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Septimania, 1,200 years ago, comprised the seven cities of southern France granted by King Pepin to the Jewish butcher who helped him conquer Narbonne. His descendants will remain for ever the secret Kings of the Jews. Moreover, because of political marriages, they are related to Charlemagne and also to Haroun al-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad celebrated in the tales of “The Arabian Nights.”
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Even the apple seed may descend from the apple that inspired Newton’s theory of gravity. Malory’s unspeaking grandmother bequeaths to him Newton’s lost journal, in which he declares, “I have found the One True Rule . . . that guides Science, that guides the Universe.”
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What could go wrong after all these promotions and revelations? Pretty much everything. Newton’s Rule (like Fermat’s Last Theorem) was too long to fit in the journal. Louiza vanishes from Malory’s life, swept away to work in secrecy for some unknown American agency.
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The lovers meet again in Rome, later the same year—for one of the privileges of the King of Septimania, forgotten by everyone except the College of Cardinals, is the deciding vote in a deadlocked papal election. Louiza is in the throes of childbirth, the result of the encounter on the church tower, but when Malory rushes her to a secret maternity ward, another woman is there, also giving birth. Both mothers and both babies vanish, nor does anyone know which child is which.
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No summary can catch the air of confusion, uncertainty and loss that pervades Mr. Levi’s narrative. As one of the characters says, “No one sees Septimania for what it is.” It makes other conspiracy theories seem under-plotted. In the background of the love affair of Louiza and Malory are universal mysteries: Newton’s One True Rule, which might embrace Einstein and Schrödinger; Aquinas’s debate as to whether wisdom alone (or science) can overcome evil; the existence of “dark matter”: and the strife of the Caliphate and Holy Roman Empire.
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One can sum up by saying that the human characters are analogues of the mysteries, and vice versa. The characters’ fates remain mysterious, the mysteries’ solutions are in the hands of the characters. At the end Malory declares himself “in tune . . . all laws, all rules, were suspended.” Even he knows this is only “for a moment,” and the enigmas remain.
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Septimania has the format of a novel, but it has roots in the folk-tales of The Arabian Nights. It reaches out to epic, in the form of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and to Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It takes in the sad modern world of refugees and terrorism, plots and code-breakers. And it’s a love story, too. More than one reading will be needed to digest Mr. Levi’s comprehensive, many-branching vision. It adds new dimensions to the idea of the novel.
“Reading Jonathan Levi’s new novel “Septimania” is like dancing on a moving stage; it’s exhilarating, even as you worry that your feet might fly out from under you.”
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“Levi creates an energetically brilliant, genre-defying masterpiece filled with lavish descriptions, mysteries intertwined with history and legend, and a large cast of memorable, offbeat characters….be prepared to stay up late savoring every word. Although it’s a literary dream of a book, it’s also a storyteller’s work of magic, and a fantastically suspenseful adventure, along the lines of Arturo Pérez Reverte’s The Flanders Panel and Iain Pears’ The Dream of Scipio, told with the aplomb and smart humor of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen.”
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“Highly intelligent, insanely ambitious and restlessly imaginative….Levi’s vast creation pays off once you give in to its unique fusion of history, music, and the origin of belief in invisible things.”
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“Laced with philosophy and wit…A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.”
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Cultured Vultures
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“Deliciously captivating, Septimania is the perfect balance of magically historical and scientifically impactful … a magical tale about love intermingled with elements from religion, science, music, and, of course, history. [R]eaders will close Septimania … lusting to reread Malory’s adventure once more, or twice, or maybe infinitely over and over again.”