The Last Templar

published	November 28th 2006 by Signet
binding	Paperback
isbn	0451219953 (isbn13: 9780451219954)
ebook
pages	544
description	In present-day Manhattan, four masked horsemen dressed as Templar Knights stage a bloody raid on the Metropolitan Museum of Art during an exhibit of V...more [close] In present-day Manhattan, four masked horsemen dressed as Templar Knights stage a bloody raid on the Metropolitan Museum of Art during an exhibit of Vatican treasures. Emerging with a strange geared device, they disappear into the night. What follows is an investigation that will draw an archaeologist and FBI agent into the dark, hidden history of the crusading Knights-and into a deadly game of cat and mouse with ruthless killers-as they race across three continents to recover the lost secret of the Templars. [close]
date added	02-01-07 edit book

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Dale rated it:

01/08/08

Read in January, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

The Last Templar is kind of like a really good made-for-basic-cable movie. It's not going to set the world on fire, doesn't have anything cutting edge about it, and in fact recycles a lot of old ideas. It comes across best when you have nothing better to do than be lightly entertained, like when you're a kid at home on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Or when you're a grown-up with a long commute.

A lot of the book's appeal for me comes from the fact that I enjoy the tradition of the pulps, two...more The Last Templar is kind of like a really good made-for-basic-cable movie. It's not going to set the world on fire, doesn't have anything cutting edge about it, and in fact recycles a lot of old ideas. It comes across best when you have nothing better to do than be lightly entertained, like when you're a kid at home on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Or when you're a grown-up with a long commute.

A lot of the book's appeal for me comes from the fact that I enjoy the tradition of the pulps, two-fisted tales of adventure with little concern beyond a plot that unfolds at breakneck speed. And The Last Templar makes no efforts to hide its pulp inspirations. The male lead is an improbably handsome yet sensitive cop, the female lead is an improbably good-looking archaeologist, and the bad guys are shadowy. The story starts with a robbery of a Vatican artifact on display in New York City, gets complicated by the inexorable murders of everyone in on the robbery, and morphs into a globe-hopping treasure hunt for a prize that will CHANGE. THE. WORLD. There are some token nods at modernism, including pop culture references to everything from the WB's Smallville to Umberto Eco, and character depth in terms of the archaeologist's struggles as a career-minded single mom and the cop's dark, haunted past, but mostly it's dumbed-down Indiana Jones stuff, with flashbacks to the days of knights and crusades.

The most interesting thing about the book, to me, was the way it handled organized religion. The treasure being sought by the good guys and bad guys is something which has the potential to bring down the entire Catholic Church, if not all organized religion. Some of the shadowy bad guys are in fact shadowy Cardinals involved in a millennia-long conspiracy. The main villain is motivated by the spectacular way in which the Church failed him. But the cop is devoutly Catholic and his faith is always portrayed in a positive light. So the author never quite descends into ham-handed "all religion is bad" polemic. He shows good, bad and ugly sides of churches and faith and leaves it at that.

Unfortunately, that even-handedness lends to the book's main weakness. The Maguffin everyone is searching for struck me as too unbelievable. Lots of different characters get their chance, over the course of the story, to go off on long soliloquies about the history of the Catholic Church and the divinity of Christ, and whether or not it can be proven, one way or the other, that Jesus was the son of God. Allegedly, if it could be proven that Jesus was NOT a divine being, the Catholic church would basically fall apart overnight. I don't buy that. But furthermore, I don't see HOW it could be proven either way, at this point, 2000 years after his death. The Maguffin ends up being the first-hand writings of Jesus, and although it is found by people who don't read Aramaic (and what are the odds, by the way, that Jesus could read and write Aramaic himself?) and then lost forever before it can be translated, implicitly it contains a passage like "Dear Diary, I taught some people to be nice to each other today. I hope in the future people don't think I'm the holy son of YHWH or anything, because I'm totally not! For real!" It's deliberately ambiguous, since it could be a fraud or it could be the absolutely genuine personal writings of Jesus, and the author doesn't seem to want to come down on either side (until the last page, when it's all moot). Again, either way, I just don't buy it. But that's what words like Maguffin were invented for - they don't have to make sense, they just have to move the plot along, and I have to admit The Last Templar moved well and was a page-turner for as long as I was able to keep my brain on "low"....less

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