The Nautical Chart [Paperback]

This tale starts with Manuel Coy, merchant seaman and pilot fallen on hard times, having been banned from the sea for two years, standing and clutching a bloody wound as the narrator introduces him and his story. But the narrator, himself, remains invisible to us until the last quarter of the book . . . and doesn't count for very much, when he finally does appear. In fact he barely plays any role in the tale at all, so it's not entirely clear why Perez-Reverte thought he needed such a distracting device.

Worse, the story the narrator is ostensibly telling us contains so many private incidents, which he could not possibly have been privy to, that his role as a recounter of these events strikes one as terminally odd. Either he's a liar or a spinner of fantasies, though when we finally meet him, there is no reason to think he is either. If he had not faded thankfully from view once more at the end, his presence surely would have ruined the entire wrap-up. But, in fact, at the end, our barely visible narrator is nowhere to be seen, gratefully forgotten by the author . . . just as he had been for the bulk of the tale.

Still, despite the fact that this story is often very slow going with a great deal of digression and seemingly irrelevant information thrown our way, an overly long slog to find the object of the search, and a singularly dull protagonist (Coy is forever attacking the other side in bloody dust-ups when they get together for various "peaceful" confabs . . . in fact he does it so often you have to wonder how dumb these clever, professional treasure hunters can possibly be, given their persistent failure to anticipate Coy's predictable attacks) . . . despite all of this, I have to say that the story still kept my attention, though I did tend to pick it up and put it down quite a bit more than I usually do when reading a good book.

The fact that Coy lusts after Tanger seems to be the only thing driving him and this, combined with his brutal conferencing methods, makes one wonder why she even keeps him around. Even he wonders about this himself, almost incessantly actually, though it doesn't seem to deter him or make him any more aware of his situation. In fact, Tanger's almost complete indifference to him, even after they seem to have hit it off, has to make you wonder just how dumb Coy can be. True, he's portrayed as a simple sailor, uneducated in all but the ways of the sea, but he seems abnormally dull, even for that. Even El Piloto, his old mate, seems to be sharper than he is.

The final denouement picks up the story's pace again, though the outcome is not particularly satisfying. It brings us back to Coy clutching at his bloody wound, having shown us how he got to that point . . . but it leaves us with no real sense that anything has really happened besides the landlocked sailor's brief excursion into the mysteries of other human beings which continue, at the end, to confound him. What Coy takes away from it all seems to be little more than the wound in his side, the blood running down his legs, and continued confusion.

And yet, despite the sometimes overly detailed facts about sea life, and the novel's faltering about midway though, it recovers at the end as we learn the secret in the story of the "knights and knaves." I won't tell you what that's about . . . but the book will if you want to try one of Perez-Reverte's less successful efforts. It is readable if you've the patience for it.

SWM

The book's strong points: the link to an ancient adventure and the historical background. Perez Reverte does his homework and is very good at surrounding his tales with historical roots. That gives the present-day adventure an epic aura. The political intrigue surrounding the historical event is another thing Perez Reverte likes to do and is good at. One further strong point that should be remarked, since it gives the book much of its appeal, is the author's ability to vividly depict places. Of course he has the advantage of locating his story in beautiful towns of Southern Spain, which hardly need any embellishment, and especially in Cartagena, where Perez Reverte himself was born and obviously knows very well. Plus, the story is ingenious.

Unfortunately, the book has one weak point, but one that is crucial in distinguishing a good novel from a great work of art. In fact, it is the cornerstone of great literature: the characters. The best-crafted character is the main one, Coy, a likable loser and basically a good and brave man. It is obvious, and the author makes no secret of it, that this character was inspired by Conrad's Lord Jim, but without the tragic, Shakespearean overtones. But most of his expressions are cliches. Nevertheless, I think every reader will root for Coy. The woman, on the other hand, is totally unlikeable. She's not even sexy. Another reviewer here was right when he thought of her as a spoiled little brat. I didn't want her to win. As a character, she's flat as flat can be. The Pilot is commonplace tough-but-good-guy, a wise old man. And the bad guys seem to jump right out of a Disney movie. The boss would be a wolf and the Argentinian a bad rat. They are the weakest point of the book.

Anyway, it's a good entertainment but don't look here for the great literary achievement.

There are several problems with this. First, the author in previous books has had plot twists and murky happenings. In this volume (as in The Fencing Master, which I read just before this) there are no twists like that, so the author seems to feel he has to replace them with something. As a result, the prose here is, at times, so overwritten and dense you wonder if he intended for anyone to read it. Paragraphs sometimes (I'm not exaggerating) stretch past two pages in length. Plot digressions (where the author stops the narrative to ruminate about something) sometimes last for most of a chapter. The conceit of this is that the book is actually written by a narrator (a minor character from the end of the book) and he is presented as an insufferable pedant. This explains why the character is this way, but not why the author decided to write the book in this fashion.

Those objections aside, The Nautical Chart is a good story, and a decent book. I did enjoy it, and am going to go looking for The Seville Communion, the one in the series I missed.