Never Mind Da Vinci, Here’s Rat Scabies
Pros
A fun, interesting journey
Cons
Sometimes a bit bogged down in historical details
The Bottom Line
If you like religious lore, British humour and/or punk rock, or you want to build an Ark of the Covenant, read this book. It’s got something for just about everyone.
Perhaps it is only fitting that I begin a review of a book awash in religious images and holy places with a confession: although I intend to devote my professional life to “serious” Russian literature, my true literary passions are… nonfiction, humor, travelogues, and any combination of the above. I love the late Pete McCarthy. I forced the Molvania website and book on more friends than, in retrospect, I probably should have. So when that magical ‘Recommendations’ feature of Amazon.com told me that I would want to read Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail, I read the description and pulled out my credit card.
The premise: Rat Scabies, punk rock drummer formerly of The Damned, lives in London across the street from a semiretired music journalist, Christopher Dawes, whom he drags all over France in search of the Holy Grail and/or other treasure.
The book is subtitled: CAN A PUNK ROCK LEGEND FIND WHAT MONTY PYTHON COULDN’T? (capitalization theirs, although it would be apropos of punk rock if I were screaming at you, right?) I don’t want to mislead you by saying that the book is terribly Pythonesque, however. The many, many wacky characters are outlandish at times, but no one screams in falsetto, “I’m being oppressed!” Both Scabies and Dawes get in quite a few good quips and wisecracks on the dry English order, but the bulk of the humor lies in Dawes’ cynical, you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up observation of Rat himself, Grail hunters and “Rennies,” the nickname he and Rat give to people obsessed with the small French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, a possible motherlode of treasure, relics, and even the Grail.
Perhaps the title itself is a misnomer, because the Holy Grail is only an indirect goal of Scabies’ (and by extension, Dawes’) quest. He mainly concerns himself with unraveling the mystery of Berenger de Sauniere, 19th century priest of Rennes-le-Chateau, who, the evidence suggests, suddenly became far more wealthy than a rural village priest should be. Codes in parchment, paintings, tombstones, churches, bizarre phenomena, and sinister crimes are only a small sampling of the paths explored by Scabies, Dawes, and company. And is there ever company. One of my chief complaints with the book is that, while having several handy insets featuring a map and some reproductions of the parchments and Rat’s to-do lists (To Find the Holy Grail: Buy metal detector and spades), there is no cheat-sheet list of the numerous characters to remind you (as Dawes doesn’t always do) who it is that just waltzed back into the action and why they matter.
Dawes occasionally does ponder bigger questions of why it matters, comparing his own unbelief alongside the various mysticisms and fanaticisms of other questers. He attributes the year of Grail hunting with Scabies to a kind of mid-life crisis. Not to spoil too much, but even this skeptical Everyman has a few experiences which soften him up a bit to the esoteric. Dawes also seems to find the historical details rather more fascinating than I do, so if you are not a trivia fan, you may find yourself skimming the specifics of what church was built when by whom.
The book has a bit in common with the immensely popular Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (which owes a lot to the work of one of Scabies’ cohorts, Henry Lincoln, author of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail), a fact which seems to be addressed in the book by Rat gradually demolishing a paperback copy of Da Vinci–tearing it up for roaches, in fact. It’s Rat’s world, really, the rest of us are just living in it and getting in the way of his schemes. I’m old enough to know that punk rock music has nothing to do with Avril Lavigne or Good Charlotte, but prior to reading this book I had never really thought about what the punks of the 1970s are doing now, or what it would be like to have them as neighbors. It’s a bit different (but charming) to read of a punk rocker having a close, happy relationship with his septuagenarian parents (even if they are the leaders of the nutty Sauniere society). Whether Rat is fixing tea and importing tiny monkeys in London, or scaling cliffs wearing only bedroom moccasins on his feet in the French countryside, he charms you. Dawes, for all his reluctance at getting roped into Rat’s schemes, admits how lucky he is to have such a ‘good mate.’ Perhaps that’s the real story here, the story of a journey to appreciating what you have, even if that mostly consists of a lunatic across the street who wants you to help him build an Ark of the Covenant. So what would it be like to be Rat Scabies’ neighbor and Grail hunting sidekick? Well, as the Damned once sang: Neat, neat, neat!
Recommended:
Yes
