My
unnecessary book review series concludes with another title picked up from a library giveaway.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith, is a modern day novel of tomb raiding and adventure, set in Egypt and the rugged Ethiopian mountains where the Nile river begins. The titular scroll is an ancient manuscript, written by the eunuch slave of a Egyptian pharaoh, that contains coded directions to his four thousand year old tomb, purportedly hidden somewhere in a great stone gorge near the headwaters of the Nile, and unspoiled all these millennia.
Seeking the tomb is a young, beautiful (aren't they always?) female Egyptian archeologist, left alone after unknown attackers murdered her husband and stole all of their work. Desperate, she seeks out the aid of a male, Lara Croft-esque English adventurer, and together they work to travel to the dangerous land and unravel the mystery of the scroll, while evil forces conspire against them and monitor their every move.
It's basically Indiana Jones 4, or discount Clive Cussler, when you get right down to it. To the scores.
The Seventh Scroll, by Wilbur Smith
Plot: 4
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 4
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 5.5
The Seventh Scroll isn't a bad novel, but at nearly 500 pages it's considerably longer than it needs to be, and it's not anything special. The characters aren't bad but they're not very memorable (one bad guy with some weird fetishes is the only one I remember anything about now, a week after reading it), the plot isn't bad but it's very straight-forward and lacking in twists or complications, and the writing is okay but never sparkling. As the scores indicate, it's a passable action adventure, but not one you'll stay up all night tearing through, nor one you'll remember long after you put it down.
I'd never heard of the author before snagging this novel, but apparently Wilbur Smith is actually pretty successful. I would have thought him a new novelist from this book, an amateur walking in the well-worn footsteps of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton; an amateur who needs to learn how to compress his plots and needs to think up a lot more twists and turns on the way to the ultimate showdown next time. I would have been wrong, since Wilbur Smith is in his 70s, has nearly 30 published novels on his resume, and had more than 65 million novels in print, as of 1995, according to the dust jacket on The Seventh Scroll. None of which makes this book any good, but now you know.
The most interesting thing about The Seventh Scroll is something I did not know until after I read it and ventured to view the
Amazon.com reviews. The surprisingly, overwhelmingly-positive Amazon.com reviews.
Scroll is actually a sequel to one of his earlier novels,
The River God, and an unusual sequel, with the action set 4000 years later.
The River God was written from the POV of a brilliant eunuch who serves an Etyptian Pharoah, and eventually carries his master's body to the headwaters of the Nile and buries it there, in a hidden tomb. The very Pharaoh and the very tomb the heroes of
The Seventh Scroll are trying to find in that novel.
Many of the Amazon.com reviewers recommend reading
The River God first, and while I obviously didn't, I'm not even sure if that would be a good idea. I got some suspense from
Scroll just because I had no idea if the tomb even existed, and if it was where the heroes of the novel thought it was. I'd think that if you'd read
River already you'd lose a lot of the suspense of
Scroll, since you'd already know there was a tomb, where it was hidden, how it had been built, and what was in it. I may check out
The River God if I ever see it though, just out of curiosity.
As for
Scroll, as I've been saying, it's just okay. The characters aren't as cardboard as those in most action adventure novels, and the setting and background plot stuff (crazy jealous safari guide husbands, civil war and guerillas in Ethiopia, crazed private collectors willing to murder for an untouched Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb, fanatical Coptic Christian orders, etc) is interesting. The main thing that held back the novel was the plot, and its lack of complications. The hunt for the tomb and the details of it are fine, it's just that there's nothing else going on in the book, and the tomb hunt and then excavation are so straight forward that I kept expecting some wild twists and seemingly-insurmountable setbacks... I'm still waiting.
As it is this novel has an amazing amount of description about river valleys, dam-building techniques, Egyptian sculpture and statuary, and the geography of mountainous Ethiopia, but it's about three major plot twists short of being a page turner. That's why I say the length is too great; it's not so much the number of pages, it's the content of those pages. Most action adventure novelists are worse writers than Wilbur, and craft less interesting characters… but they're generally far better at cranking out involving, twisty plots, and those are what keep you reading. I suppose that Wilbur wanted to keep the novel somewhat realistic, and didn't want there to be half a dozen false tombs with ancient clues hidden in each one to lead on to the next, but there was plenty more unbelievable stuff in the story, and at least those sorts of plot twists would have made it more interesting to read. With a bit better plot this could have been quite an interesting novel. Pity it wasn't.
I've also got to reluctantly single out Wilber's writing when it comes to action or sex scenes, because he's amazingly bad at them. I'm not quite sure why, but even during the numerous life and death struggles and the occasional kinky and somewhat explicit sexual interlude, his writing seemed so stiff and cold that I never felt any excitement. Of either kind. He's not boring in all of the writing, and he's not academic and dry in his descriptions, but for whatever reason the fight scenes and sex scenes always felt very remote and passionless.
I didn't glance at the author info until after I read the whole book, but my impression from reading it was that Wilbur Smith was an older gentleman, retired from some real career, and that while he knew a great deal about history and geography and everything else, and was technically proficient as a novelist, that he just didn't have the skill to make characters come to life. Especially not when they were doing dangerous or sexy things. And when I looked at the back of the book and saw the picture of the elderly white guy, and learned from his bio that he worked as a tax collector into his 30s before becoming a writer, I was sad to see my stereotype come true. He actually looks pretty spry in
the bio photo on his website, with a definite twinkle in his eye, and I'm judging him by just one book, but at least in the
The Seventh Scroll he seems to be a decent writer, but one without a lot of imagination or ability to incite emotion in his readers.
