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3.0étoiles sur 5
Leonardo, the hidden years, Janv. 14 2001
The Memory Cathedral is a fantasy disguised as a historical novel. The disguise is very convincing--author Jack Dann has done a great job setting the scenes of his story. In Italy we have torchlight processions, raving mobs, daggers and poisons, sunny Tuscan uplands, cluttered artists' studios, decadent nobility, and etc. In the Levantine lands, we have double- and triple-crosses, parades of cavalry, sumptuous banquets of whole beasts on rice, scheming slavegirls, wholesale slaughter of innocents, and so on. We also have an improbably gifted hero, only our belief is willingly suspended because Leonardo really was improbably gifted. In this novel, he is not the emotionless man of impersonal genius we think of today. Rather, he is very like his fellows: a man of hot italianate passions, excelling in many fields like most of his colleagues did. One feels upon reflection that the real Leonardo must have seemed thus to people around him--maybe more single-minded in his work, maybe a few shades more accomplished in his art, but not seeming out of place in the Renaissance, a time when "a man may do all things if he will." It was only later that Leonardo was esteemed as a genius practically from another world. There is plenty of action, lust, and intrigue, some of it bumping up against many readers' comfort threshold. These, and the marvelous scene setting, carry the novel's entertainment value. The character development is strictly standard fantasy fare. The bonds between the characters are shown mainly by having one group set off somewhere, and another character demanding to be allowed to go along. Suspense is achieved by having Leonardo demand to know where somebody is, or where he himself is being taken. He also, despite receiving frequent veiled and unveiled death threats from the powerful, becomes their trusted confidant. So if this sounds interesting, go ahead and enjoy it. The weaknesses were not apparent to me until second reading, so strong were the book's strengths. I shall remember this feat of imagination for a long time.
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