Customer Reviews

Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo Da Vinci

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The Memory Cathedral is a fantasy disguised as a historical novel. The disguise is very convincing--author Jack Dann has done a great job setting the scenes of his story. In Italy we have torchlight processions, raving mobs, daggers and poisons, sunny Tuscan uplands, cluttered artists' studios, decadent nobility, and etc. In the Levantine lands, we have double- and triple-crosses, parades of cavalry, sumptuous banquets of whole beasts on rice, scheming slavegirls, wholesale slaughter of innocents, and so on.

We also have an improbably gifted hero, only our belief is willingly suspended because Leonardo really was improbably gifted. In this novel, he is not the emotionless man of impersonal genius we think of today. Rather, he is very like his fellows: a man of hot italianate passions, excelling in many fields like most of his colleagues did. One feels upon reflection that the real Leonardo must have seemed thus to people around him--maybe more single-minded in his work, maybe a few shades more accomplished in his art, but not seeming out of place in the Renaissance, a time when "a man may do all things if he will." It was only later that Leonardo was esteemed as a genius practically from another world.

There is plenty of action, lust, and intrigue, some of it bumping up against many readers' comfort threshold. These, and the marvelous scene setting, carry the novel's entertainment value. The character development is strictly standard fantasy fare. The bonds between the characters are shown mainly by having one group set off somewhere, and another character demanding to be allowed to go along. Suspense is achieved by having Leonardo demand to know where somebody is, or where he himself is being taken. He also, despite receiving frequent veiled and unveiled death threats from the powerful, becomes their trusted confidant.

So if this sounds interesting, go ahead and enjoy it. The weaknesses were not apparent to me until second reading, so strong were the book's strengths. I shall remember this feat of imagination for a long time.

"The Memory Cathedral" joins the small but distinguished company of "Lord of the Flies" and Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love" as one of those books I could neither put down nor bear to read any further. I must concur with the previous reviewer, this is a truly brilliant novel, but the squeamish and sensitive would be best advised to steer clear. If you are more inured to sex, violence and general darkness than we more delicate souls, give this book a try. It is a glorious and disturbing masterpiece, all the more powerful for the author's obviously painstaking research into the people and environment of Leonardo's Italy and the Middle East, not to mention the life and works of the protagonist himself.

I bought this cause a book review segment in Asimov's made it sound good. To be honest it is brilliant, but not to my taste. The graphic violence, explicit sex, & general darkness of the story turned me off. It is well written & well researched, but my tolerance for darkness, death, & depravity is low.

This book caught my eye because of its interesting premise: What if Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machine had really been created and had worked? This is an obviously well-researched, albeit far-fetched, study of the life of this great visionary of the Renaissance. I must say that it was the historical detail in this novel that kept me with it. It was otherwise saturated in blood, sex, and death. Dann's style of writing is fairly decent - and the book offers a unique peek into the life of the great Leonardo Da Vinci. Yet, no matter how well you love history, you had better stay away from this one if you get queasy by the sight of blood.

Jack Dann's latest book blends historic figures with well-researched fiction to detail the loves, inventions, coups and many `flights' of Leonardo da Vinci in Renaissance Italy and beyond. Set during a "lost" period of the historical da Vinci diaries, "The Memory Cathedral" is a daring `what if...'.
Drawing on the possibility of actually building many of the devices of warfare found in Leonardo's sketches, Dann comes up with a plausible person to implement them, and reasonable political expediency for doing so.
Dann admits a few historical `nudges' in his afterword, but these don't detract from the novel, and indeed make it more entertaining. Developing interesting interactions between famous characters who never met in actuality is always fun. Enjoy spotting the famous names, and applaud how Dann handles them.
Although the work drags in places, particularly in the first half, there's enough action by the end of it to keep readers of military SF happy, and enough background details to satisfy epic fantasy fans. Like his protagonist da Vinci, Dann seems to have demonstrated mastery of many areas of the SF/fantasy spectrum in this single work.

I wish I could say something constructive about this book, but, frankly, I can't.

This essentially is a volume of poorly researched, sloppy writing and embarassing sex scenes that made me cringe. Few of the events are even remotely possible, and the chronology is muddled and malaligned. I strongly discourage buying it.