The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery [Hardcover]

Enrique Joven (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Joven's remarkable debut, while bearing obvious similarities to The Da Vinci Code, is much more than another pale imitation. Father Hector, a science teacher in a Spanish Jesuit community, finds relief from indifferent students in an online group devoted to the real-life Voynich Manuscript. Written in an unknown language, the 500-year-old document has defied the best efforts of cryptographers and scholars to decipher it. Hector's research into an actual recent book, Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder's Heavenly Intrigue, which accuses Johannes Kepler of poisoning his mentor and fellow astronomer, Tycho Brahe, eventually ties in with the mystery surrounding the Voynich Manuscript. Local politicians' efforts to evict the order from the monastery where Hector works complicate the plot. Joven manages to cleverly blend fact and fiction as well as make the scientific debates of the 16th century relevant and compelling. (May)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ross King The poetic Spanish title of Enrique Joven's second novel, "El Castillo de las Estrellas" ("The Castle of the Stars"), has been given a Richard Dawkins-friendly title by its American publishers, which suggests a clash between religion and science. The provocative change isn't unwarranted. Joven, a physicist, writes in his introduction that he wants to "delve imaginatively into certain circumstances . . . that attempt to undermine the credibility of science itself." This delving isn't entirely imaginative, since he admits to having "used real people and situations" to make his case (one hopes the publisher's lawyers have taken a good look at the text). Defending the credibility of science isn't the most auspicious premise for a novel. More often, writers like to show the mayhem that scientific arrogance wreaks on the world. But Joven has put together a fine recipe for a thriller. The book's subtitle tags the real-life Voynich Manuscript, whose history the narrator describes as "a cocktail of hieroglyphics, emperors, astrologers, and, to top it all, Jesuit priests." The inspiration for numerous books and even more Web sites, the Voynich is the world's most mysterious manuscript. Not a single word of the 240-page text, probably written in the 1400s and now housed in Yale University's Beinecke Library, is understood. It has stumped even the U.S. government's top military cryptologists. A scramble to decipher the Voynich Manuscript places Joven's novel in the race-against-time-to-unlock-a-secret-code-and-foil-an-evil-cult genre that has been one of the most popular of the Noughties. His hero is Father Hector, a 30-something Jesuit priest and high school math and physics teacher in rural Spain. When not trying in vain to interest his students in Newton and Kepler, Hector spends his free time logging on to his computer to keep in touch with other Voynich fanatics. His interest in deciphering the manuscript becomes more acute when he discovers that his school, part of an old Jesuit monastery, has some obscure connection with the Voynich and that the entire property -- honeycombed with secret tunnels -- has been bought by a shadowy American company and is scheduled for demolition. One of Hector's fellow Voynich enthusiasts, a beautiful young Mexican named Juana, turns up at the school with the news that she's been getting death threats. Hector and Juana, with the help of another of Hector's cyberfriends, an English astronomer named John, try to crack the Voynich code before the school's appointment with the wrecking ball. They also try to untangle the manuscript's bewildering history. The science and history lessons come fast and furious: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, history of the Jesuits, Paracelsus and alchemy, John Dee and Edward Kelley, the Prague of Rudolph II, the laws of planetary motion, the Gregorian calendar. Luckily, Joven's lively expository prose (given in Dolores M. Koch's smooth and efficient translation) stops the book from collapsing under its own weight a la Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum." Hector takes diverting trips to Rome and the Canary Islands (where we're treated to a fascinating tour of a high-tech astronomical observatory). But he actually spends most of his time reading Wikipedia articles on his computer or instant-messaging his cyberbuddies. He's not so much an armchair detective as a double-click detective, a Mycroft Holmes for the digital age. How does he respond when a new clue unexpectedly turns up? "I went up to my room and started surfing frantically on the Internet." James Bond he most certainly isn't, though he does finally tear himself away from Wikipedia long enough for some derring-do in a suitably atmospheric castle. The Jesuits aren't the villains in this clash between God and physics. Joven's target is the real-life Discovery Institute, an American think-tank that promotes the theory of intelligent design. The author, no less than his narrator, is also enraged by Joshua Gilder and his wife, Anne-Lee, who wrote "Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries." This popular history, published in 2004, uses modern forensics to build an intriguing (but hardly airtight) case for Kepler's having poisoned his mentor, Brahe, to lay his hands on his valuable astronomical data. Few historical celebrities are safe from this kind of CSI-style forensic finger-pointing. Ancient whodunits are solved and peccadilloes of character supposedly explained, from who killed King Tut to whether Napoleon was a martyr to hypogonadism. However, Joven is strangely outraged at Kepler's treatment by the Gilders. (Even an institution as honorable as The Washington Post Book World comes into the cross-hairs for supposedly giving the book a "cloying, not to say openly biased" review.) What's Joven's objection to the book? "One of the most respected figures in the intellectual history of Europe was converted in their writings to a delinquent," fumes his narrator. The idea that a genius can also be a delinquent should surely appeal to a novelist or historian. As George Orwell wrote of Salvador Dalí: "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other." Some of that complexity of character and motive is missing from this clever blend of fact and fiction in which the former is often more compelling than the latter.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; Tra edition (May 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061456861
• ISBN-13: 978-0061456862
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #944,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worse than Dan Brown, August 18, 2009

By	Happy Booker (Guelph, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery (Hardcover)

The writing is turgid. The author is proud to announce that Wikipedia (and Amazon.com) are his primary sources. There is no conclusion. I finished it only because I assumed the author was going somewhere with it. I was wrong.

3.0 out of 5 stars A good read, but only if you're into astronomy, July 26, 2010

By	The Tao of Netflix (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery (Paperback)

I expected much more from this book than i received. Based on the jacket, I expected an adventure-like combo of neat history and weird religious stuff intertwined, but it ended up being much more of an exposition on all things astronomy, particularly its historical evolution. If you like astronomy, you'll probably enjoy the ad nauseam detail it provides; if you don't, you'll end up being bored as I was. There were a few instances where i did get excited, but only to be let down; there's a whole bit about catacombs and hidden passages under a building that never quite went anywhere (despite its potential), and neat trips throughout Italy, that also failed to produce anything remotely adventure-ish. Also, the ending was terrible; this story demands a meaty conclusion that offers something of value to justify the reading experience. Rather than telling you anything worthwhile, it merely points to what i hope is a not-to-be developed sequel. Overall, while my review sounds harsh, it was a pleasant read, just not particularly memorable.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't Get Into It..., December 26, 2009

By	PeeWee (Georgia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery (Hardcover)

Checked this book out from the Public Library because it looked interesting....in fact, it's not a compelling read, and I stopped after 55 pages..appreciate the other negative reviews that helped seal the deal...