The Last Ember by Daniel Levin

Summary and Review

Jonathan Marcus is a young, high powered attorney from New York. His background in classics--he was once a fellow at the prestigious American Academy in Rome, gives him the perfect background for legal work dealing in ancient artifacts of dubious ownership. One afternoon, he is handed a memo telling him to board a plane for Italy. In Rome, he finds himself trying to defend a mysterious client's ownership of two ancient pieces of Roman marble. The seemingly innocuous court case brings him face-to-face with an old girlfriend and together they are thrown into a deadly race to recover an ancient artifact from the last temple in Jerusalem.

The Last Ember has a clear political agenda. It is clearly anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel, and was written to counter alleged historical revisionism occurring in the Holy Land. I have no problem with Levin writing from this viewpoint, but I think the reader should be informed of it upfront. Daniel Levin's website, www.daniellevin.com, is straightforward and makes his views clear.

I picked this book up from the Readers' Choice table in my local library. The storyline as summarized on the back of the novel sounded intriguing enough, and I thought it would be a nice break from some of the hefty non-fiction histories that I've been reading lately. I have to say that I was really disappointed.

As I said, the idea for the book is interesting, but I can't even give Daniel Levin credit for that. Have you read The Da Vinci Code or watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or National Treasure? If so, all you need to do is throw in some Nazis (oh wait, Indiana Jones already took care of that), a mysterious, conspiratorial group of wealthy religious fanatics (check, The Da Vinci Code), a family legend passed down through generations (check, National Treasure), a race against the bad guys through the underground of Rome (The Da Vinci Code again), the Knights Templar (check, Indiana Jones, National Treasure, and The Da Vinci Code) and an ancient artifact, sought after for its power but lost to history as a mere legend (again, check, check, check).

No joke, the plot for this book was lifted straight from these previous storylines. The characters were rote: the noble, indefatigable policeman, a la Brown's Bezu Fache, the sexy, smart and uptight Sophie Neveu/Abigail Chase/Elsa Schneider female sidekick character, and the hero, in this case modeled after the author himself, a former-American-Academy-scholar-turned-international-lawyer, all brawn and brains.

There was even a scene in which the hero is trying to save his colleague, who is dangling over a precipice, from certain death. Marcus yells to his friend to give him his other hand, but the colleague, who is clutching a priceless historical find in that hand, refuses to let go, and so slips from Marcus' grasp, falling into the abyss below (p. 270). I could almost hear Harrison Ford saying, "Elsa, give me your other hand, honey. I can't hold you!" and Alison Doody's reply, "It'll be ours, Indy! Yours and mine!" just before her glove slips off and she falls screaming into the crevice.

Seriously.

But you know what? I could have dealt with all of that. After all, that's how much of literature happens, building and borrowing from previous works. I could even have looked past the utter cheese in the book, such as the description of Jonathan Marcus' and Emili Travia's first sexual encounter, when the description of Marcus removing Travia's clothing is likened to an archeologist "uncovering archaeological strata that required great study and attention" (p. 333). Ugh. That is just. so. bad.

But anyway, I could have gotten past all of that if it hadn't been for the unbelievably poor characterizations. For the most part, the characters were extremely one-dimensional--all good, all heroic, or all bad. And the ones who weren't--well it was hardly a surprise. As paradoxical as it sounds, even the duplicitous characters are irritatingly one-dimensional.

Most irritating was the way that Levin wrote the character of Emili Travia, the sexy and supposedly smart former colleague-cum-lover of Jonathan Marcus. Supposedly, Emili is so brilliant that she has a post as a preservationist with the UN--deputy director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome. She's received prestigious awards and can even, upon entering a dark, partially ruined chamber, instantly ascertain that the stone came from quarries in Jerusalem rather than Rome (p. 350). Yet she doesn't know the origins of the name "Maccabee," has never heard of the Hanukkah story (pp. 174-175), and when faced with a fresco depicting the life of Joseph of Egypt, she is at a complete loss to identify it:

"These frescoes," Jonathan said. He trained his beam on a series of ancient paintings that lined one of the corridors. "They look recently excavated." In the first painting, the pigment had faded, but the figures were quite clear: a young man, in a neck chain hitched to other prisoners, pulled heavy stones.

"I don't recognize the myth," Emili said. "Sisyphys pushing a boulder?"

"No," Jonathan said. "Look at the next painting." The same young prisoner, Jonathan noticed, the chain still around his neck, but he was now standing before a king, who listened raptly. The prisoner was pointing above his head, where two rows of cows stood side by side among starts in a night sky.

"In this last frame, a slave has been brought from prison before a king," Emili said. "It looks like an Egyptian pharaoh."

"Yes," Jonathan said, "and he's interpreting the pharaoh's dream, pointing to skinny cows and fat cows."

"What Roman myth is it, then?" Emili said. (p. 215)

Are you KIDDING me? "What Roman myth is it, then?" And just in case you still think that this world-renown archeologist should be excused for her ignorance, perhaps on the basis of a secular upbringing, 50 pages earlier Emili quoted the Abrahamic covenant, citing Sunday school as her reference (p. 173). She must have been a very selective listener, both in Sunday school and in graduate school.

Oh, and she knows Latin well enough to read Ovid's erotic poetry (p. 39), but throughout the book, Marcus is constantly having to translate other Latin passages for her, such as "Phere Nike Umbilicus Orbis Terrarum" (p. 184), which I could pretty much get the gist of with just a couple years of high school French.

To me, this is all evidence of two things: lazy, sloppy writing, first of all; and second, it indicates that the author has a very low estimation of his readers' intelligence. Clearly Levin, a Harvard Law graduate and former visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, is not unintelligent. Therefore, I have to conclude that he thinks his readers are.

I know that a lot of the things I mentioned seem petty. And to be honest, there are a number of books that I enjoy which suffer from some of the same problems that I've mentioned above. However, in the case of The Last Ember, I didn't see anything to redeem these failings and make it worth my time as a reader.

★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (2/10)

Content:

Blood and gore: Yes; nothing that you won't see in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, however.

Sex: There are a couple of sexual encounters referenced, but they are not descriptive and overall the sexual content is extremely mild.

Language: The F-word is used once. Otherwise the book is fairly clean.