Crusades – Malcolm's Round Table

The Templar Salvation by Raymond Khoury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Raymond Khoury’s The Templar Salvation (2010) sequel to The Last Templar (2006) is better than the original. Like the original, The Templar Salvation presents a story of lost/hidden church secrets with dual time lines, a lot of historical detail, and plenty of action.

In the present day, Khoury brings back FBI agent Sean Reilly and archeologist Tess Chaykin in a race with terrorist Mansoor Zahed to find a cache of early Christian documents. In 1203, while the Fourth Crusade siege of Constantinople is in progress, a small band of Templars sets out to rescue and then hide the same set of documents. In both time lines, the Catholic church doesn’t want the documents to come to light.

The Last Templar featured an amazing opening scene. The Templar Salvation’s opening, while slightly less spectacular is action-oriented and inventive. Tess is in danger. Sean rushes to the rescue and, in spite of the law enforcement resources available in Turkey and at the Vatican, becomes the point man in a search for Tess, Mansoor, the documents, and a variety of people who end up dead.

The Templar Salvation is more tightly woven than The Last Templar. It also contains fewer “talky scenes” where Tess and/or Sean explain elements of the 1203 story to present day police officers as though 800-year-old information trumps current evidence or the need to get out of the squad room with some sense of urgency. The Templar Salvation might be called “The Book That Will Not End.” Tess, Sean and Mansoor find themselves within nanoseconds of being killed (or worse) numerous times throughout the story only to escape/survive and keep on searching, fighting or running.

Nonetheless, the improbable story somehow makes for more exciting reading than The Last Templar. The Templar Salvation is a violent, tangled, twisted, groaner kind of escapist read that features the kind of over-the-top, don’t-worry-about-civilian-deaths-and-collateral-damage law enforcement that viewers of the TV series “24” tuned in every week to see.

Like agent Jack Bauer in “24,” Sean Reilly is as relentless as a Terminator in his quest for neutralizing the bad guys and possibly obtaining justice. And, like Jack, Sean keeps going, going and going even though his wounds would have killed ten normal men.

The book is a guilty pleasure.

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Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire,” “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey,” and “The Sun Singer.”

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kate Mosse’s engaging and well-researched novel Labyrinth (2006) brings readers another version of the Holy Grail and those who would protect it, seek it, destroy it and use it. Labyrinth joins Khoury’s The Last Templar (2006) and The Templar Salvation (2010) and Neville’s The Eight (1997) and The Fire (2008) in its presentation of a religious secrets story that switches back and forth between time periods and characters.

Set in thirteenth-century Languedoc and twenty-first century southern France, Labyrinth presents readers with medieval and modern characters who are searching for the Grail with good and bad motives. Alaïs du Mas, the daughter of the steward of historical character Raymond-Roger Trencavel in Carcassona, resides in a world where Cathars and Catholics live in harmony with each other. Alice Tanner, a professor of English literature in Sussex, is a volunteer in an archeological dig in the Sabarthès mountains in France in 2005.

The lives of these dual protagonists—and the characters around them—become intertwined across history when Alice inadvertently discovers some of the Grail secrets Alaïs dedicated her life to protect. Alaïs’ world is under attack by a Crusade and subsequent inquisition ordered by Pope Innocent III in 1208 against the Cathars who were viewed by Rome as a heretical sect. Alice’s world is that of a modern police investigation into deaths and thefts linking a mainstream archeological dig with a shadowy world of those who follow or oppose the Grail.

The mirror aspects of the characters’ lives across the centuries serves Mosse and her plot well. Unlike Dan Brown, who viewed the Grail as Mary Magdalene and Arthurian literature that viewed the Grail as a sacred chalice, Mosse presents instead the secret artifacts which are intended to lead true seekers through both a real and a figurative labyrinth to the Grail as a transcendent experience.

With the exception of a slow beginning and a few sections where the detail in both the modern and medieval worlds becomes more history and travelogue than a novel, Labyrinth is a well-told story. The novel’s discussion guide notes that the book begins with short glimpses of the leading characters without any narrative to tie them together or explain their motives, and then asks “what effect does this have on you, as a reader?” It’s a good question. Some readers will find it slow and unnecessarily obscuring of the story, while others will find that it heightens the intrigue and suspense.

For readers who want to know more about the life and times of the Cathars, Mosse includes a historical note, a selected bibliography, information about the langue d’Oc spoken in Alaïs’ world as well as a glossary of Occitan words.

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Malcolm's Round Table

Tag: Crusades

Review: ‘The Templar Salvation’

Review: ‘Labyrinth’ by Kate Mosse