Book #19 of 2020: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

I was on a reading roll all year. What else is there to do as a global pandemic shuts everything and forces one to work from home and to stay at home 99% of the time?

On the internets I encountered a list of "Top 10 Novels Recommended by Medievalists." I'd read a few historical fictions of high quality so far in 2020, so I took the plunge with the Number 1-Rated book on the list, Labyrinth. It sounded fine, having Chartres and Languedoc as settings, and concerning in some ways the secret of the Cathars. Why not, I thought? It was recommended for its scholarship and intricate plotting, after all.

This book is a giant turd. It is the worst trash I've read since that dreadful The Girl Who Did A Bunch of Ludicrous and Impossible Stuff series. Every character is knocked unconscious at the end of a chapter and wakes up befuddled at the beginning of the next. Every character is replicated by a doppleganger who lives in a different century.  The concurrent story lines in the 13th and 21st centuries are both thin and uninteresting. The secret of the Cathars is dull and silly tripe stolen third hand from Holy Blood, Holy Grail and thence via that garbage churner Dan Brown.

There are highlights in this novel. The sex scenes are quite amusing, with "she could feel his desire for her pressing firmly against her back," or "she moaned as he slid deeply into her." A woman with a PhD goes to a public library for research about a particular labyrinth and types the imaginative keyword 'labyrinth' into Google, then prints 72 pages of crap that you could find in a child's book, marveling at her discoveries. All of the much-lauded "scholarship" in the book is delivered by one character to another in a tedious summary of Crusader history that Wikipedia would pull down in a day.

I honestly don't know why I finished it. It took 2 weeks to read.

Avoid at all costs, unless you like Dan Brown, which billions of people did. I will studiously avoid the rest of the Languedoc Trilogy and its secrets of the Cathars. Re-read Nancy Drew novels instead, which have stronger characterization, better plotting, and less pretense. This is like a long episode of Magnum, P.I. where Higgins dreamed the entire thing after digging up the Tiki doll from The Brady Bunch.

Netflix

I had only one positive reaction to Superman Returns; having endured such banality I assumed I'd at least be spared an equal dose for a while. Hollywood couldn't possibly produce a duck like that again in short order.

Wrong. Remember the duck that was shot and put in the freezer and lived? And then had cardiac arrest and was defibrilated and lived again? That duck had a lot in common with the returning Superman, and has just as much in common with the new Bond. At the risk of being labeled a film fuddy-duddy who can't suspend his disbelief long enough to enjoy a goofy action flick, I pronounce Casino Royale (with Cheese) abysmally stupid:

Men can jump forty or fifty feet through the air in a single bound. Over and over. They leap like fleas. The first chase scene was something out of Spiderman or The Matrix. And it was boring, almost as boring as the 45-minute Texas hold 'em match that makes up much of this trainwreck.

More than $100 million in cash apparently fits into a tiny metal brief case, even though earlier in the same movie $100 million took several large trunks in a convoy of vehicles to carry around.

James Bond is a new 007 now, today, at this minute. M muses that she wishes Bond were around during the Cold War, thus rendering completely senseless the only bit of the Bond franchise with any remaining dignity--its chronology.

Of course I must note that the new Bond actor is appealingly gritty and dark and is certainly the beefiest Bond ever. Daniel Craig had a curious affect on the libido of the other person inhabiting my house, who was unaware there was any incoherence in the script at all, and who spent 30 minutes after the finale rewinding and rewatching dripping bathing suit scenes.

I could hook her up with more sensibly written real pornography.