Book Review: Michael Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows

Fascinating, well-researched, masterfully crafted Shakespeare pseudo-history. Silly, overly complicated, implausible, downright infuriating potboiler whodunnit plot - but there's a method to this madness.
Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows bears a lot of similarities to Dan Brown's literate mysteries. It's a rare-book scandal unraveled by following a skein of coded messages. In this case, the messages are 17th-century cryptography. The author seems to have a firm grasp on this arcane stuff, but I can't tell. He explains the techniques in detail, but I can't follow them. Then, I was one of those lazy students who skipped calculus because I had heard that it was hard. My loss, I'm sure.
The Shakespeare invented history is amazing and jaw-dropping. If you haven't read Bill Bryson's Shakespeare you might bring that along. Gruber even invents old documents written in Elizabethan argot. Like the cryptography material, these seem authentic, but I couldn't tell you.
Then there's the mystery plot. He gives us two protagonists - intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin and film freak Albert Crosetti, each of whom lusts after finding a long-lost, heretofore forgotten play of the Bard's - The Tragedy of Mary Queen of the Scots. This material would have been too hot politically for Shakespeare's time, which Gruber provides as both the reason it was written and the reason it had to be hidden. He does provide a synopsis, and of all the invented stuff in this book, this play is the most intriguing. It would have been one of the greatest dramatic pieces ever written, right up there with Macbeth.
This convoluted plot may cause you to pull out what's left of your hair. But just when you think it's insulted your intelligence one time too many, Gruber begins to hint at what he's doing. Miskin and Crosetti have a series of heated discussions about whether art imitates life or the other way around. Crosetti insists that movies, being our collective subconscious, provide models for all our social interactions. As it turns out, Gruber's plot is so unsatisfying because it both apes and defies movie formulas. The good guys do some awful things, make all the wrong decisions, and are not particularly admirable except in retrospect and apology. And the bad guys make Tarantino's stupid killers look smart.
So - I'll just say that the mystery plot is so badly crafted - and I believe deliberately so - that it more than proves its point.

Book Review: Bill Bryson's Shakespeare

Ever since I learned that Gerald and Shakespeare both mean "spear chucker," I've had a long-standing Jones for the Bard. Quite coincidentally, a colleague recently suggested that I'd enjoy anything written by Bill Bryson. My friend suggested A Walk in the Woods or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first sounded too much like a mossy travelogue and the ambitious scope of the second seemed far too cumbersome for casual sampling. So Bryson's biography, Shakespeare: The World As Stage, was the irresistible choice for me.

I can now agree that Bryson may be the most entertaining nonfiction writer I've ever read. He dares to be a stylist in these days of plain-vanilla journalism, and that is praiseworthy in itself. Perhaps it's in the blood: His father was a sportswriter with the flair of an H. L. Menken or a Heywood Hale Broun.

Apparently Bryson was assigned to write Shakespeare as an entry in the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books (a HarperCollins imprint, a News Corporation subsidiary, a Viacom competitor, and a prize possession of Rupert Murdoch et al). Right off, Bryson seems bewildered that so much material has been generated about the most illustrious English dramatist -- and most of it on scanty and even nonexistent evidence. You can almost hear Bryson implore, "I got stuck with writing this, now how do I fill a few hundred pages without making stuff up?" He starts by describing the Chandos portrait (shown here), and after tantalizing us with intriguing details about the wealth of the sitter (apparent from the dark clothes, which require lots of expensive dye) to the earring (as rakish on a man then as now), the embarrassed biographer bestows the fact that no one knows whether this most famous likeness is actually the person we've been told it is.

Bryson chatters on, quite amusingly, making much ado about nothing as he overturns reams of research. Perhaps because statistics offer some hope of solid evidence, he informs us that Shakespeare's vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000, but today's world is a more complex place. But -- and here's the astounding factoid -- when Shakespeare couldn't find an appropriate word, he apparently made one up.

In fact, Shakespeare contributed about 800 words to your 50K. Among these coinages are: abstemious, antipathy, assassination, barefaced, critical, eventful, excellent, frugal, indistinguishable, leapfrog, lonely, well-read, zany, and, as Bryson quips, countless others, including countless.

Suffice it to say Shakespeare must have had a fairly deep knowledge of Latin and Romance-language root words and syllables, to so effectively concoct and combine new polysyllabic English ones. Is this more grist for the grinders who allege Shakespeare was in fact someone else? Bryson does not comment specifically, but he does a credible job of debunking various Baconian and Marlovian speculations later in the book.

Shakespeare's turns of a phrase also enhanced the language. Many of his inventions are cliches of modern speech (Bryson's compilation): one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father of the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, and foregone conclusion.

The King James Bible was a new translation back then. Most spiritual and scholarly works were still being written in Latin. So the English Bible and Shakespeare's plays apparently contributed more to our daily discourse than you'd think.

I plan to read lots more Bryson, and thanks to him I now admire William Shakespeare (whoever he was) more than ever.

I am *not* this guy!

If you're into self-empowerment, leadership, human diversity, and team building, click here because he's probably the one you want.

If instead you're a fan of Tucker Max or Chuck Palahniuk, you're not exactly home but you're in the neighborhood (a classier part, I'd say, but let's not diss commercial success).

For example, I suppose James Earl Jones made the same decision I did - to always use my middle name Everett in an effort to set myself apart (and "build my brand," as the other GJ might suggest) from the myriad Google hits you'll get on Gerald Jones, including an Australian who owns auto body shops, a scholar of Mormon history, and an authority on comic books (dangerously close to comic novels, but if you know the difference, that's another sign you're in the right place).

BTW Gerald means spear shaker, which is another tantalizing clue that "Shakespeare" was the pen name of Gerald Francis Bacon. And every male knows that shaking your spear might or might not be impressive, but be warned it will almost always get you into trouble.