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Nick Bantock has hit on a winning formula. His
Griffin & Sabine books combine just enough romance and intrigue to satisfy on a story level while his keen visual and design sense produces books that qualify as art objects, regardless of the characters and adventures that ostensibly are the volumes' raisons d'être.
Alexandria, which follows
The Gryphon in Bantock's second Griffin & Sabine trilogy, finds his most famous creations, Griffin Moss and Sabine Strohem, acting as advisors and guides for the story's protagonists, Matthew Sedon and Isabella de Reims. Continents apart--Sedon in Alexandria, Egypt, and de Reims in Paris--the two lovers correspond with each other and with Griffin and Sabine, professing their love to each other (things get a little sappy, especially early on) and sharing secrets from their respective research into Egyptian arcana. Meanwhile, the two are shadowed by the mysterious, perhaps evil, Frolatti.
Combining mythological and New Agey concepts, such as a possible psychic link ("I've always had a sense that there's another voice deep inside me.... [F]rom the moment she [Sabine] first wrote to me, the voice became more insistent," writes Sedon to de Reims), Alexandria raises more questions than it answers, but its pleasures lie less in the unfolding of the mystery than its visualization. Using postcards and letters to tell his story, Bantock finds wonder in his seemingly organic collage of postmarks, stamps, and images, as well as in the form of the letter itself. Alexandria comes complete with actual envelopes housing missives from its protagonists, a visual and tactile shortcut into the exotic that's the equal of a literary description. --Shawn Conner
From Publishers Weekly
It's been 11 years since Bantock first introduced the eponymous stars of Griffin & Sabine, the beautiful and unusual novel in which the reader became a voyeuristic third party to the lush correspondence between London postcard designer Griffin Moss and South Pacific postage-stamp designer Sabine Strohem; two subsequent volumes completed the trilogy. Last year, Bantock launched a second trilogy with The Gryphon, reuniting Griffin and Sabine and introducing Egyptologist Matthew Sedon and Isabella de Reims, a student in Paris. At the outset of this latest epistolary volume, Matthew informs his beloved Isabella that Sabine has somehow become a part of him, in order to heighten his powers of intuition. This comes in handy when Isabella finds herself menaced by their sinister foe, Frolatti, and Matthew is called away by an exciting archeological find. Is the mysterious sculpture discovered at the dig site what Frolatti has been after? Bantock has fashioned a maddeningly labyrinthine, wildly romantic and exquisite work that reveals just how much story can be conveyed with a few well-placed words and images. He threads the theme of dualism seamlessly throughout, underscoring Sabine's assertion, "In each of us there are two worlds-the practical and the mythological" and the notion that the coming together of the two, as embodied here by Isabella and Matthew, is an essential part of some grand design. The book's cliffhanger ending will only intensify the eagerness of fans for the concluding volume, The Morning Star.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
