With its approximately 750 pages, it doesn’t exactly have a “carry-on” format, but as summer approaches, The Eight by Katherine Neville should find a place in many suitcases. This historical-esoteric novel, a huge success when it was released in France in 2002 (1988 in the United States) with over 200,000 copies sold, unavailable for several years, is finally being reissued by the Cherche Midi publishing house. It has all the ingredients of the perfect beach tome: adventure, mystery, the great story, the most modest… Stated like this, the recipe may arouse fear in those allergic to a genre intellectualized by THE Name of the rose by Umberto Eco and popularized by the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. They would be wrong: even if you are not a chess fan, even if you do not like the occult, the book is seductive.
One of its great strengths is its skillful blending of two eras. The first part takes place in 1790, at the heart of the French Revolution. In the south of France, while the threat of confiscation of clergy property looms, the abbess of Montglane Abbey decides to exhume pieces of a treasure hidden for decades and disperse them by entrusted to novices sent on the roads. Then the book plunges into 1973 in New York: a young computer scientist who works for Triple M, the largest computer manufacturer in the world, is transferred to Algeria by her employer. A punishment, she believes. She perceives the curious things that are brewing around OPEC, without yet measuring their scale. But the danger comes from elsewhere: from this chess tournament during which a grandmaster died, from this antique dealer who asks her to find a game, from this strange family to whom she is close, but with strange behavior.
The Eight happily passes from Catherine the Great’s Russia to pre-oil shock Algeria, from the corridors of the UN to the most violent hours of the Terror. We meet characters like Talleyrand, Napoleon Bonaparte in his native Corsica, the exalted Marat and Charlotte Corday, Voltaire and Richelieu. In the contemporary period, on the occasion of an OPEC summit which will decide the fate of the planet, we discover the Libyan Colonel Gaddafi, who is already acting out, the Algerian Boumédiène and many others. We have the impression of (re)living History, distant school memories come back. From time to time, we understand that the author, the American Katherine Neville, has transformed the events to make them fit her plot, but there is nothing crude in it, just a slight twist of the history.
Even the esoteric part of this chess game that everyone is running after works perfectly. We imagine the tray offered by the Muslim governor of Barcelona to Charlemagne. We want to touch the pieces, this golden camel carrying a tower on its back, this man perched on an elephant with its trunk raised, this woman on a sedan chair, symbolizing the queen, inspired by those of the Ancient Egypt or Persia. From the Europe of Charlemagne to the New York of the 1970s, via the Paris of the French Revolution, the pieces disperse, come together, move away again. We follow their journey with passion as if on a set, we end up imagining all the characters as queen, fool, knight, black or white. It doesn’t matter if we don’t know anything about the rules, we let ourselves be carried away, we want to delve into a manual. I promise, tomorrow, we’ll get started.
We don’t understand everything. We are surprised by certain improbabilities, like this plane opportunistically appearing at the bottom of the desert to bring the heroin back to hospitable lands. We sometimes regret the artificial side of the writing when the novel is interrupted to give way to the “story” of this or that character which goes back a little further into the past. We smile at certain excess adventures, we get annoyed for a second at certain lengths, but we want to know, we hang on. We let ourselves be seduced by the deliciously old-fashioned atmosphere of New York in the 1970s, of newly independent Algeria, which is reminiscent of the first James Bond, vintage collector’s items that we always revisit with pleasure. And we don’t regret it when the veil is lifted on the mystery. Next November, a reissue of the sacred firewhere the daughter of Catherine Velis, the heroine of Eight. To read, this time, under a blanket in front of a fireplace or to offer at Christmas.
The Eight By Katherine Neville, Translated from English by Évelyne Jouve, Le Cherche midi, 752 P., €21.90