Imagination goes beyond ‘The Code’

The biblio-mystery enters the 21st century in this complex adventure that combines a 25-year-old investment banker’s quest for a medieval manuscript with his deepening obsession for a sophisticated computer game, a clever concurrence that brings into fresh focus the continuing conflict between two compelling worlds, the actual and the virtual.

What makes Lev Grossman’s second novel unusually interesting is that his principal character, Edward Wozny, begins his odyssey in search of a priceless relic knowing next to nothing about rare books and caring even less about their value as cultural artifacts, an undergraduate degree in English literature from Yale notwithstanding.

Until this eventful interlude, Edward has been fixed on making money for his clients and on his burgeoning stature as a financial wizard. He is drawn into the world of literary arcana by pure happenstance. About to leave the New York office of his firm for a major promotion in London, he is recruited by a fabulously wealthy and equally mysterious duke and duchess from the north of England (whose portfolio he has masterfully enhanced) to search for an obscure text among many crates of old books gathering dust in the loft of their unused Manhattan apartment.

Why Edward, of all people, would be ideally suited to the task of finding a 14th century book believed hidden somewhere among a dozen crates of rare books sent to the United States before the onset of World War II for safekeeping is never explained with total satisfaction. But he does get help along the way in the person of Margaret Napier, a young graduate student he meets almost miraculously in one of several extraordinary coincidences that dot the landscape of what might otherwise be regarded as an intricately woven plot.

Playing Virgil to Edward’s Dante, Margaret offers a crash course in such bibliographical niceties as foliation, incunabula, hand-tooled bindings, illuminated letters, rubrication, palimpsests, parchment leaves and that most enticing concept of all, the codex, which is basically a book assembled in the form and shape we know today but composed of handwritten pages and assembled in the years before the invention of movable type, and thus unique.

Edward’s assignment is to find by whatever means possible a convoluted romance of knight errantry and derring-do said to have been written during the late Middle Ages by a man named Gervase of Langford. Complicating his effort is the prevailing belief that “A Viage to the Contree of the Cimmerians” is an apocryphal piece of writing known as a “ghost,” a work mentioned over time in secondary sources but never actually seen or handled by scholars. Edward’s two-week hiatus as a literary detective gets immediacy from the realization that the discovery of the purported codex is crucial to the fortunes of the ducal couple, each of whom is pursuing a personal agenda quite apart from the other’s. Margaret, meanwhile, is emboldened by the intoxicating prospect of how her career might change after successfully documenting a work written by a contemporary of Chaucer’s.

Just as diverting is Edward’s simultaneous immersion in a brilliantly constructed computer game known as MOMUS, an open-ended narrative with dazzling graphics and multiple plot lines that drives him to utter absorption and exhaustion. It is in this milieu, in fact, where things really get creepy, with bits and pieces from one plane of his existence -- the search for the Langford codex -- resonating among the zeros and ones of a pastime played collaboratively by numerous participants at all hours of the day, but most intimately at night on the powerful computers of their unsuspecting employers.

The strands finally do converge, nudged together in a resolution that will leave some readers wondering just how many stories in the naked city can intersect so plausibly between the hard covers of one novel. But that is a small distraction, because Grossman (whose day job is as book critic of Time magazine) writes with an accessible, inviting style, and his characters are appealingly human. His take on the world of computer gamers has the ring of complete authenticity, and it should be of great interest to all of the aficionados of that curiously addictive world.

Grossman’s knowledge of rare books, moreover, is solid and impressively articulated, although the driving premise is invented. Google to your heart’s content, but you will find nothing factual about Gervase of Langford (c. 1338-c. 1374) or “A Viage to the Contree of the Cimmerians.” This is not Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” in other words. As a debut effort in that genre, “Codex” does just fine and will earn its share of appreciative readers. *