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Dante's Equation
by Jane Jensen
(Orbit, £7.99, 695 pages, paperback, first published 2003, this
edition published August 2004.)
Review by John D Owen
I suppose you could say that Jane Jensen's  Dante's
Equation is roughly in the same area as Dan Brown's highly successful
The Da Vinci Code. After all, it name-checks a cultural icon
in its title, and for most of its considerable length, the book is about
tracking down and decoding the parts of a Kabbalistic manuscript written
by a Jewish mystic named Kobinski, who disappeared from Auschwitz in
mysterious circumstances. Thereafter, the book does go spinning off
into territory unvisited by Brown: alternate worlds, corresponding to
personal hells for the characters. The various strands all come together
again for the finale, naturally.
As a storyline, Jensen's plotting is workmanlike, though there are
a couple of major "with one bound they were free" moments that strain
a reader's incredulity to breaking point and beyond. Jensen's main problem
in retaining reader interest as that her characters are less that wonderful
people that most of us wouldn't want to spend much time with. And with
a sprawling story spread over nearly seven hundred pages, that's a big
hurdle for the average reader to get over -- if you get turned off by
the characters in the first chapters, it is going to take a lot to keep
reading through to the end. Personally, if I wasn't reading for review,
I might have thrown this book onto the 're-cycle' pile long before the
half-way point, the characters grated so much on me.
And that's it in a nutshell, really. The storyline isn't bad, but Jensen
writes herself into corners that requires major leaps of faith from
the reader to believe in her solutions, and she doesn't really earn
the right to that faith along the way. Her characters are distinctive
but unsympathetic, so it's hard to develop any empathy for them. As
a whole, the book didn't work for me on any level, and was a struggle
to finish. A hard book to recommend to anyone, frankly.
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