Arthur Phillips. 2004. The Egyptologist: A Novel. Random House, New York. ISBN 1-4000-6250-0.
Arthur Phillips’ 2004 novel The Egyptologist snagged my imagination right from the very first page. In 1954, an American woman named Margaret Finneran Macy dies, and her nephew, Laurence Macy, writes a retired Australian detective for information about Margaret’s past. The mysteries in Margaret’s history occurred in 1922, when she was engaged to archaeologist Ralph Trilipush, who was working in Egypt with the financial backing of Margaret’s father. These mysteries are revealed to the reader through correspondence--letters and cables from several of the participants, the detective’s report, and Ralph’s working journal.
Reading the report and journal, one is drawn in to the central question of the book: Is Ralph incompetent, an imposter, insane, or simply a sweet, misunderstood scholar? The reader can’t be certain until the very end of the book, and in some places I believed one thing on one page and another on the next. Ralph is working (maybe) in the Valley of the Kings, near where Howard Carter finds Tutankhamen’s tomb; and the parallels between Carter / Carnarvon and Twilipush / Finneran are so acute that you start to wonder about Carter’s sanity, honesty and credentials.
Reading the report and journal, one is drawn in to the central question of the book: Is Ralph incompetent, an imposter, insane, or simply a sweet, misunderstood scholar? The reader can’t be certain until the very end of the book, and in some places I believed one thing on one page and another on the next. Ralph is working (maybe) in the Valley of the Kings, near where Howard Carter finds Tutankhamen’s tomb; and the parallels between Carter / Carnarvon and Twilipush / Finneran are so acute that you start to wonder about Carter’s sanity, honesty and credentials.
Hot Flappers and Harvard Professors
There are great comic elements in this novel that I should just let you find for yourself, involving speakeasies and ancient and modern pornography and Australian circuses and Victorian gentlemen and hot Boston flappers and intrepid British explorers and snotty Harvard professors and ... but I'll let you find them.
The Egyptologist is one of the few novels I’ve read in recent years that I literally could not put down. I took a whole afternoon off to finish it, and when I was done I had to go back and reread some pieces to savor some of the sweetness. The novel is blackly funny, evocative of both the roaring twenties of Boston and the working conditions of the Valley of the Kings under the British, and I highly recommend it to anybody looking for a good, absorbing, funny adult novel.
The Egyptologist is one of the few novels I’ve read in recent years that I literally could not put down. I took a whole afternoon off to finish it, and when I was done I had to go back and reread some pieces to savor some of the sweetness. The novel is blackly funny, evocative of both the roaring twenties of Boston and the working conditions of the Valley of the Kings under the British, and I highly recommend it to anybody looking for a good, absorbing, funny adult novel.
