The Memory Cathedral : A Secret History of Leonardo Da Vinci

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Summary: Leonardo, the hidden years
Review: The Memory Cathedral is a fantasy disguised as a historical novel. The disguise is very convincing--author Jack Dann has done a great job setting the scenes of his story. In Italy we have torchlight processions, raving mobs, daggers and poisons, sunny Tuscan uplands, cluttered artists' studios, decadent nobility, and etc. In the Levantine lands, we have double- and triple-crosses, parades of cavalry, sumptuous banquets of whole beasts on rice, scheming slavegirls, wholesale slaughter of innocents, and so on.

We also have an improbably gifted hero, only our belief is willingly suspended because Leonardo really was improbably gifted. In this novel, he is not the emotionless man of impersonal genius we think of today. Rather, he is very like his fellows: a man of hot italianate passions, excelling in many fields like most of his colleagues did. One feels upon reflection that the real Leonardo must have seemed thus to people around him--maybe more single-minded in his work, maybe a few shades more accomplished in his art, but not seeming out of place in the Renaissance, a time when "a man may do all things if he will." It was only later that Leonardo was esteemed as a genius practically from another world.

There is plenty of action, lust, and intrigue, some of it bumping up against many readers' comfort threshold. These, and the marvelous scene setting, carry the novel's entertainment value. The character development is strictly standard fantasy fare. The bonds between the characters are shown mainly by having one group set off somewhere, and another character demanding to be allowed to go along. Suspense is achieved by having Leonardo demand to know where somebody is, or where he himself is being taken. He also, despite receiving frequent veiled and unveiled death threats from the powerful, becomes their trusted confidant.

So if this sounds interesting, go ahead and enjoy it. The weaknesses were not apparent to me until second reading, so strong were the book's strengths. I shall remember this feat of imagination for a long time.

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Summary: Bringing the past to life.. simply breathtaking!
Review: The Memory Cathedral is an unforgettable novel which captures the essence of the Renaissance lifestyle without the pomp and pretension of a typical historical novel. Instead, author Jack Dann presents a fictional account of a year in the life of Leonardo da Vinci - painter, sculptor, poet, inventor, entertainter and lover.

With a wealth of colourful characters including Lorenzo de Medici and Niccolo Machiavelli, Dann's novel opens up the Renaissance period to the average reader - and whilst being entertaining, its dedication to the period in which it is set means that you are effectively receiving a complimentary history lesson. Yet the manner in which the book is written portrays the characters as being very much 'real' people, rather than the usual two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs offered by most historical texts.

At times gloriously uplifting and at times numbingly tragic, the novel contains fairly brutal accounts of murder, rape and torture. Certainly not for the faint hearted, The Memory Cathedral is a powerful and haunting work of historical / biographical / science fiction which combines aspects of adventure and discovery with the real-life drama that may well have been Leonardo da Vinci's life. It is the gripping tale of one immortalised man who will live through the ages as a symbol of sheer artistic genius, and it is a tale which is being told as never before.

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Summary: An Imaginitive View of History
Review: This book caught my eye because of its interesting premise: What if Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machine had really been created and had worked? This is an obviously well-researched, albeit far-fetched, study of the life of this great visionary of the Renaissance. I must say that it was the historical detail in this novel that kept me with it. It was otherwise saturated in blood, sex, and death. Dann's style of writing is fairly decent - and the book offers a unique peek into the life of the great Leonardo Da Vinci. Yet, no matter how well you love history, you had better stay away from this one if you get queasy by the sight of blood.