The Egyptologist

Having read Arthur Phillips first novel, Prague, and not thinking much of it, I didn't know what to expect with his second, The Egyptologist. It made Stephen King's top ten books of the year, and the subject matter--archaeologists in Egypt in the 20s, is a fun time period, so I bought a used copy.

I liked this book a good deal. It's very interesting stylistically, as it is told in epistolary form by two unreliable narrators. One of them is Ralph Trilipush, a self-important Egyptologist who seeks to find the tomb of a possibly apocryphal king. His journals are full of self-reverence that drip with baroque humor. He has the unfortunate distinction of digging for a tomb at the same time Howard Carter is looking for the tomb of Tutankhamen, and you can see where that's going.

The other narrator is Harold Ferrell, an Australian private eye. He is hired by the estate of a British industrialist to find all of his illegitimate offspring. Ferrell gets on the tail of one of them, who disappeared in Egypt during World War I. Ferrell is writing his recollection of the events thirty years later, in answer to a man seeking family history. Ferrell is so enthusiastic in his reply that he structures his letters like a mystery novel.

The two narrators describe events quite differently, so as the reader goes back and forth between them it's hard to know what to believe, which is the fun of it all. There's also a twist that though I saw coming, is still rather clever, and requires a very careful reading of the ending to figure out entirely (I'm still not sure what became of one of the characters). The writing is very rich and the humor droll. A second read would probably clarify things much more, but it wasn't quite good enough to compel me to do that.