Fiction: This cracking tale of four men of letters turning into unlikely detectives is intellectual, yet accessible, writes Shane Hegarty
The Dante Club starts with a murder. And what a murder. The victim's "wide, slightly hunched back sloping into the crack of the enormous, snowy buttocks, brimming over with the crawling, pallid, bean-shaped maggots above the disproportionately short legs that were kicked out in opposite directions. A solid block of flies, hundreds of them, circled protectively. The back of the head was completely swathed in white worms, which must have numbered in the thousands rather than the hundreds". The grisly punchline comes in hearing that it is only when the victim is found, following four days of lying under this mound of creatures, that he finally groans his last breath.
It is Boston, 1865, and a literary group, led by the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is on the eve of introducing the first translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy into America. This "Dante Club" - consisting of poets and Harvard professors Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T. Fields - meets weekly to peruse the proofs. Their work, however, is met with rabid disapproval by the Harvard authorities, disgusted by the supposed moral corruption of this foreign work.
In this, Matthew Pearl's début novel is dealing in fact; using real literary history as the foundation for a literary thriller. Twenty-nine-year-old Pearl is a Dante scholar, awarded a prize by the Dante Society, the organisation to emerge from that original club, and using it to fashion an unlikely plot.
So, he thrusts these factual characters into gruesome fiction. That first murder is followed by more, each mirroring with dreadful precision the punishments imagined by Dante; each adapted to suit the particular misdemeanour of the victim. The Dante Club members slowly realise they may have summoned forth some monstrous reconstruction of Dante's work. They attempt to solve the mystery and prevent further murders, while protecting both their own reputations and that of their treasured Dante.
Meanwhile, when a vagrant jumps to his death through a police station window - his last mutterings being lines from The Divine Comedy - it draws in officer Nicholas Rey, the first black police officer in Boston and a man whose intuition and intelligence is matched by the ignorance and disdain of many of those who serve with him.
Pearl reaches deep into the rich horror of The Divine Comedy to inform much of the plot. He replicates its unflinching voyeurism. He also matches its gathering rhythm, as the four men descend ever further into the case, gradually letting loose the grip on their varyingly weighty egos until, as did Dante, they finally meet their Lucifer.
Pearl also draws from contemporary horrors, finding much in common between the landscape of Dante's hell and the battlefields of the Civil War, from which the Boston and America of the Dante Club has only recently emerged. His description of "entire landscapes of protruding knees and arms and the tops of heads" could come from either place. The men of the Dante Club are drawn, not just further into the inferno visited by the poet, but also into that which was passed through by the veterans.
Yet Pearl's is a witty, refreshing novel, erudite and enlightening, as unusual a primer to Dante's classic as it is original in plot. It is beautifully descriptive of place. This Boston is a murky one, split between the mansions of the wealthy and the tenements of the underclass. It is a city in which the animals must be wary of distemper and their masters of a random garrotting. But Pearl also reminds us of the fame these poets once had throughout each strata of society, of their influence and stature among both students and storekeepers.
Best of all, though, it is an excellent thriller; a cracking tale of foul deeds and four men of letters turning into unlikely detectives. Yet Pearl holds a tight control over this world of fiction and fact, sending us and his characters down dead-ends, constantly pushing along the plot, but never letting it careen away. It makes for a most unexpected delight. Intellectual, yet accessible. A scholarly read to bring to the beach.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
The Dante Club. By Matthew Pearl, Vintage, 372pp. £6.99