Julia, a young and beautiful art restorer discovers
a hidden inscription in a famous Flemish painting she’s
working on. The painting shows two knights playing chess
and a woman in the background, reading.

From here the plot commences, a complicated thriller
involving murder, love, art, phulosophy, mystery and chess.

The chess aspect immediately captured my attention. I’ve
never read a book involving chess before, and have been looking
for one for some time. So as I stood in the bookstore and flipped
through the book’s pages, the chess board diagrams convinced
me to buy it.

This book has a lot in common with “The Da Vinci code”, in my
opinion. Both are about art and mystery, both involve mysterious
murders and both explore the connection between the past and the
present. The redability is also comparable… similar to Dan Brown’s
thriller, “The Flanders Panel” grips the reader pretty hard – it’s
not easy to stop reading.

As in any good mystery novel, the beginning draws a tangled
plot, with many complications anticipated. Julia and her friends,
with the help of a strong chess player, discover a connection between
the story the painting tells and the chess game described there. They
believe that playing the game backwards will help them understand the
history of the people drawn. At this point, my expectations were very
high, since the chess analysis was quite enjoyable, and I anticipated
complication to multiple levels – for example the floor in the painting
was painted as a chess board, and I expected a different level, one
with the floor being the board and the three people being chess pieces.

But as I went on reading, I got more and more dissapointed. The plot
went into a completely different direction after the first murder. The
“mysterious player” played the game forward, and the “backward” direction
was immediately forgotten. My dissapointment came to its climax when
it became clear how white won. It seemed just like a stupid mistake on
behalf of the black, which didn’t fit the high level of the game.

But I found the end very satisfying – especially when it became known
that a machine was playing black (btw, I was wondering throughout the whole
book, why didn’t Julia just use a PC). It shattered all the “deep” philosophy
about finding out about a player’s character and mindset from how he plays
chess.

The author seems to have read “Godel Escher Bach”, since he brings quotes
from there, and the old painting owner refers to Bach’s music the way
hofstadter talked about it in GEB. References to Sherlock Holmes are also
abundant, which is nice for his fans (like me

The writing style is nice, and the book is very readable as I mentioned
before. Reverte has a compelling way to describe characters, I think.

To conclude, I recommend this book as a good, light reading. It requires
some knowledge of chess, though even without chess the plot is quite clear.
Just be aware of having too much expectations

Related posts:

1. Book review: “El maestro de esgrima” by Arturo Pérez Reverte
2. Book review: “Cannery row” by John Steinbeck
3. Book review: “Mysterious Island” by Jules Verne
4. Book review: “Chess skill in man and machine” by Peter Frey
5. Book review: “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2004 at 17:47 and is filed under Book reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.