Book review: Pantheon

According to Private Eye, the literary editor took it to the editor who consulted Mr Freedland, who … well, you can guess what. As it happened the rejected reviewer was none other than Michael Dibdin, author of the splendid Aurelio Zen crime novels who, perhaps a bit miffed, took it to the Times, which happily published it. So the bad review appeared after all, and Mr Freedland looked a bit of an ass.

However, he soon had reason to cheer up. The Righteous Men, a novel in the Dan Brown vein, soared to the top of the bestseller lists both here and in the USA, and, according to his publishers, his next three novels were all bestsellers too. “He is,” they say, ”the most successful British thriller writer to have emerged in the last six years,” and, so confident are they of the merits of Pantheon that the front cover proclaims it, or perhaps Sam Bourne, as “The Number One Bestseller”, and have priced it at a mere £12.99. So all’s well that ends well, and what did the late – but great – Dibdin know about anything? (Well, he knew the difference between good and bad writing, actually.)

The best news about Pantheon is that Bourne has steered away from the Brown model, and so the book doesn’t quite insult any reader’s intelligence. It’s true that the central idea of the plot is absurd – the villain, a distinguished American academic, wants to see Britain destroyed by the Nazis in 1940 in order to further his programme for eugenics, or scientific breeding; but this is no more absurd than the central idea of The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Three Hostages. A thriller can accommodate a deal of absurdity; it depends on how it is written and whether you can make your wilder flights credible.

So here goes. It is the summer of 1940. Dr James Zennor (Cornish name), rowing blue, psychology don at Oxford, wounded and traumatised veteran of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, now deemed unfit for war service, returns from an early morning outing on the river to discover that his wife, Florence, and three-year-old son Harry have disappeared. Florence, you should know, is an ex-Olympic swimmer and also a beauty and a brainbox (even if she never shows any sign of intelligence).

Other dons and friends seem to know more about her disappearance than James; they also tell him that Florence was frightened of him, and for him, on account of his sudden violent rages. (Fair enough; he keeps losing control throughout the novel.) Eventually he finds she has sailed to America as one of a party of Oxford wives and children being given refuge from the war by Yale University. (There was such an evacuation, as Bourne confirms in an end-note.) Zennor sets off in pursuit after applying a spot of convenient blackmail to the Master of his College, and, once he reaches Yale, mysteries abound and all sorts of terrible things happen, before our hero comes through triumphantly.

There is also a subplot involving the Right Club (upper-class Fascist sympathisers) and a cipher-clerk in the American Embassy. This too is based on historical fact. Bourne has done his research, if not quite as thoroughly as he might have. The villainous anti-Semitic quasi-Fascist Tory MP refers to the Mosleys as “Diana and Oswald”; I would have thought that Jonathan Freedland would have known that all Mosley’s friends called him “Tom”. Perhaps he forgot this when he turned into Sam Bourne.

All the eugenics stuff is well sourced too, and it may come as a shock to readers – and a horrid one to many of those who read Mr Freedland’s newspaper – to discover that those who were, like the Nazis, keenest on scientific breeding to improve the racial stock and eliminate what we now know as the underclass were mostly pillars of the Left-Liberal intelligentsia. One up to him for coming clean on this.

The novel rattles along happily and entertainingly enough, with a blithe use of coincidence and a happy disregard for police procedure when Zennor finds himself a suspect in a murder case and in the hands of an Irish-American cop. There’s some nice silly stuff about sinister fraternities and a wolf’s head pin (just a touch of the Dan Browns here), and I would have found it all more enjoyable if the hero hadn’t been quite so tiresome and unlikeable.

But then you can’t have everything, and Sam Bourne gives us quite a lot, enough for a longish rail journey or to distract you in an airport while you are waiting for your flight to be rescheduled. The writing is often slack and clichéd. Adrenalin pumps through Zennor’s system rather too often. (Memo to thriller writers: best leave adrenalin to sports commentators). We are told that Zennor’s brain moves faster than his body, but the reader’s may often move faster still. Nevertheless, it’s good enough fiction for when you are in the mood for lazy reading.

• Pantheon by Sam Bourne

Harper Collins. 406pp. £12.99