Book Review: The Testament

Posted by Paula Stiles Jan 27, 2007

Eric van Lustbader's The Testament (2006) feels like a cross between The Da Vinci Code and a Clive Cussler adventure. It's better than Dan Brown's turgid potboilers, but not as good as Dirk Pitt. The hero, Braverman (Bravo) Shaw, loses his mysterious father in a terrible explosion. Soon, he's caught up in a race between two secret societies (the Order of the Gnostic Observatines and their papacy-backed enemies the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood) to find a cache of artifacts. His only ally, Gnostic Observatine "Guardian" Jenny Logan, may also be his worst enemy.

This is a straightforward modern Grail story after the pattern of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (see this week's film review). The idea of a "testament" written by Christ (hence the title) isn't new. Nor is the idea behind the "Quintessence".

Lustbader writes good action scenes and keeps the plot moving, though he drones on with too much background. Unlike Brown, who not only had his wife do his highly derivative research for him, but also cynically exploited the genre with an "I'm going to make a bestseller for people who don't read" attitude, Lustbader did his own homework. Some of the best melding of setting with plot occurs in Venice, which Lustbader appears to have both visited and loved, unlike Brown's Paris, which is unrecognizable to anyone who's actually visited that city.

The good plot stuff mainly involves the female arm of the Order of the Gnostic Observatines, led by a Venetian anchoress named Arcangela, whose agent in the world becomes Jenny. There's a lot of intriguing background hinted at about Renaissance Venice's whores spying for God across Europe. The book might have been really something had it centered around Jenny. It's high time we had a Grail story with a female protagonist.

Alas, the highly competent Jenny exists only to help Our Hero, the clueless, naïve and self-involved young Bravo. Whenever a book's protagonist has a silly nickname like "Bravo", this is a bad sign. The fact that just about every character in the book is movie-star beautiful or handsome is another one.

Jenny is ruined as a character by falling in love with Bravo, even though he's a complete twit with daddy issues. Bravo is the worst part of the book, and since he's in most of it, that's a problem. He abuses and rejects Jenny, for example, based on the word of a misogynistic priest he himself admits is an idiot and of someone who later turns out to be a major villain with a sinister interest in separating the young couple. Until quite late in the book, if Bravo trusts someone, it's a guarantee that person is a villain. His character judgment is that bad.

Lustbader bases his mythical secret military religious order, the Gnostic Observatines, on two historical groups: the Fraticelli, a radical arm of the Franciscans who insisted on St. Francis' original aim of apostolic poverty and were declared heretical in 1318, and the early medieval Gnostics. The Gnostics believed every human had a spark of God inside him or herself and could therefore arrive at the truth of Scripture him or herself. The Gnostics rejected Church authority as corrupted by a Satan-dominated material world and advocated a life of the spirit. They were also anti-war pacifists, which would make them antithetical to the philosophy of a military order.

The Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood, as Lustbader himself admits in his Author's Note at the end of the book, are based on the Knights of St. John (Hospitallers). The Hospitallers were the second great international military religious order, after their rivals, the Templars. They were also known as the Knights of Malta and the Knights of Rhodes, due to their having headquarters at various times on those two islands.

Lustbader avoids the traditional use of the Templars as guardians of the Grail. Unfortunately, the Franciscans are not a good group on which to base a military order like the Gnostic Observatines, either, especially one tolerant of Jews, as Lustbader makes his Gnostic Observatines in politically correct fashion. The mendicant orders (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) made up the bulk of the Inquisition, and as such, were hostile to the military orders, heretics and Jews. Lustbader also betrays an ignorance of the basic nature of military religious orders when he calls his inner circle of Gnostic Observatines "priests". These orders were monastic orders where the priests had a very auxiliary role. Those in such an inner circle would all be monks.

The Hospitallers are also a bad model for anti-gnostic pro-Catholic heavies the Knights of St. Clement. Lustbader ignores a truly gnostic group from the 12th and 13th centuries--the Cathars (or "Albigensians") of southeastern France. Northern French forces led a nominally religious crusade (more a papally sanctioned naked land grab) against the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade during the early 13th century (mainly 1208-1225). Neither the Hospitallers nor the Templars supported such "internal" crusades against enemies at home, since they diverted badly needed funds, supplies and personnel from the struggle to hold onto Palestine. Some local Hospitallers during the Albigensian Crusade even supported the Cathars, drawing censure from Pope Innocent III. Why would the Hospitallers then actively persecute another gnostic group later on for the Papacy?

This book isn't perfect, but a fan of the genre should still find some good in it. Someday, hopefully, Lustbader will write a story centered around the women of the Gnostic Observatines. They're much more interesting than the men.