This book was a hard one to wrap my head around.
The premise is that an author from the Golden Age of science fiction wrote a book, where he supposedly encoded great secret truths about God and the universe. Except maybe he didn’t, and it’s all just people finding meanings that aren’t there. Except maybe the book never existed in the first place, because almost no one has ever seen a copy, and the only semi-reliable cases where one appeared ended abruptly when the book dealer in question ended up dead.
There are a variety of main characters here, and it’s difficult to say who among them might be the “main” character. There’s an albino woman from the South Pacific island where the author in question spent WWII. There’s her husband, a math professor terrified he’ll never make that grand contribution that will help him achieve mortality. There’s the face-blind used book dealer turned investigator trying to track down the husband after he disappears. There’s a Russian mobster who threatens him into searching for a copy of the book. And there’s flashback sequences of journals and letters written by the author and his contemporaries (including folks like Robert A. Heinlein and John W. Campbell).
We also get a few chapters from this book, which might not ever have existed in the first place.
The author, I eventually figured out, is based to some degree on L. Ron Hubbard. A religion, or possibly a scam, was founded based on his writings: the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes of God.
(As an aside, it took me a little bit to figure out that he was based on Hubbard. I was thrown by the name of the religion, which made me think of the Church of All Worlds that got started based on Stranger in a Strange Land. This confused me, because Heinlein is a character within The Circumference of the World. It wasn’t until the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes of God bought a cruise ship that I realized it was Scientology, not the Church of All Worlds.)
(As another aside: it’s very funny to me that I had a moment of “Oh, this is the other religion based on mid-twentieth century pulp science fiction.”)
Anyway. The book alternates between the present (actually 2001), where various actors are looking for the book; the 40s and 50s, when science fiction was in its golden age; and a middle section coming from the book in question.
The flashback sequences were very well done. I know more than a little about the period and the players, and I think Tidhar did a great job of capturing both the optimism and the confidence/cockiness of the genre of the time (as well as the sexism and racism of guys like Campbell and Heinlein).
The excerpts from the book-within-the-book were fantastic. If you told me it was something written from that time period, I would believe you. I honestly want to read this book in its entirety.
The Russian mobster’s flashbacks to his time in the Soviet gulags were interesting, and again were well crafted, but also rather brutal.
But overall, I didn’t particularly enjoy this book. It felt a little pretentious, in a Jonathan Franzen-esque fashion. I don’t like feeling like a book is over my head. This was my second try at Tidhar, and I doubt I’m going to try a third.