here's a special lexicon of praise reserved for thrillers: "taut," "gripping," "suspenseful," "page-turner," "adrenaline rush.
All those pithy little sound-bites-in-print, so familiar from the back covers of best-selling nail-biters, apply to Thunderhead, the new novel by Douglas Preston '78 and Lincoln Child. However, the book deserves more. It calls for another set of descriptors you might not associate with the average thriller--phrases like "intellectually stimulating, " "historically and scientifically eye-opening," "an uncommon blend of passion and scholarship." That's because this is no ordinary thriller, destined to keep you up late one night and be forgotten by dawn. There is much in Thunderhead that lingers.
The book brings together an unharmonious group of archaeologists (Is there any other kind?) and plunges them into the quest of their lives--a search through the canyon country of southern Utah for the lost city of Quivira, one of the legendary seven cities of gold for which Coronado searched in vain. The quest pits the group against the elements, including the storm that lends the book its title; against some of the harshest country in the world; against one of the greatest riddles of modern archaeology; against a mysterious danger out of the lost city's past; against a host of personal and professional temptations; and ultimately, against each other.
For Preston, Thunderhead is a unique sort of convergence. Its plot weaves together a number of the major themes in his previous writing--his love of the forbidding country of the Southwest and his penchant for navigating it on horseback (Cities of Gold); his fascination with Southwestern Native American lore (Talking to the Ground); his interest in archaeology and its bastard cousin, treasure hunting (a series of high-profile articles in The New Yorker); and a special genre of fiction that he and Child have made their own--the scientific thriller (Relic, Mount Dragon, Reliquary, and Riptide).
"The book did bring together all kinds of different threads of my writing," Preston acknowledges. "Cities of Gold, which was my second book, where I retraced Coronado's search for the legendary seven cities of gold on horseback--that was one thread. And Spanish history, archaeology, yes, all those things came together in the book, as well as Native American witchcraft."
For readers familiar with Preston's work, that union of themes makes the book all the more intriguing because it seems to bridge the gap between the surprising extremes of his writing career--the real-world curiosity and grounding in fact of Preston the journalist and the soaring imagination and speculative daring of Preston the best-selling novelist. Thunderhead is, in short, the fruit of a cohabitation with which, one senses, the author himself hasn't always been comfortable.
"In the hard journalism I do--writing for The New Yorker and other magazines--there's no room for invention," he explains. "Although you can have a literary play within that structure, you can't make anything up. And I really see that as the more important part of my writing career."
In fact, when Child, his old editor and friend, first suggested that they collaborate on a novel set in the American Museum of Natural History--about which Preston had already written in Dinosaurs in the Attic--Preston was reluctant. "I thought, 'I'm not going to write a novel. That's not very serious. I'm doing my serious non-fiction books. But then when I moved on to New Mexico and found myself starving to death, I thought, 'Well, maybe it would be fun to do something like that.'"
The result was the best-selling Relic, which Preston still describes laconically as "a novel about a brain-eating monster in a museum."
When it was finished, Preston decided to opt out for the sake of honor. "I told Lincoln, 'I don't want my name on it. I don't want to damage my pristine literary reputation.' And I also told him to keep the money. I didn't really think it was going to sell. But he called me up one day and said, 'Well, I sold the book,' and he named the advance. And I said, 'Oh my God, put my name back on and give me half the money.'
Today, Preston no longer chaffs at being best known as an author of best-selling novels--"They're a lot of fun to write, and also, they help support my serious writing," he says--but he does have reservations about being confined to a narrowly defined genre.
"My goal--and I hope this doesn't sound arrogant--is to write a book that really transcends the thriller genre," he says. "The genre itself has a lot of clichés and formulas to it. But in centuries past, there were wonderful books written, wonderful plays written, that had all the elements of a fabulous thriller--violence, sex, extreme human behavior--and yet were great literature. Shakespeare is a perfect example. His plays were the thrillers of the time, and yet they're great literature. But please don't think I'm saying Thunderhead is great literature, because I'm not."
Perhaps not, but it is certainly much more than a run-of-the-mill thriller, if only because of the incredible richness of historical, cultural and scientific detail underlying the zigzagging plot.
The heart of the book--beneath all the story angles and personality conflicts--is Preston's penetrating look at the world of archaeology, a science that, he believes, carries greater temptations than most.
"Archaeology is not a reproducible science," he explains. "For a physicist who's doing an experiment in a laboratory, the brake on fraud is very strong because he knows the experiment will be duplicated elsewhere, and his results will either be confirmed or not confirmed. In archaeology, on the other hand, when you excavate a site, you destroy it. No one else can come back and excavate that site. It's gone."
Preston's first article in The New Yorker was about a prominent archaeologist named Frank Hibben, whose greatest work was suspected of being fraudulent."He had told me as I was working on the article that he was going to sue me for libel," Preston recalls. "He said, 'I'm going to take away everything you have.' Well, he never did. And the statute of limitations, thank God, expired, and the reason he didn't, of course, was that the everything in the article was accurate."
A more recent New Yorker article concerned an archaeologist named Christy Turner, whose controversial theory about cannibalism among the Anasazi--the much-admired, vanished civilization of the Southwest--is echoed ingeniously in Thunderhead. For Preston, Turner is the archetypal maverick.
"I think scientists who make great discoveries tend to be mavericks," he explains. "They tend to be people who are not thinking along the same lines as everyone else. They often can be very difficult people. The three days I spent with Christy Turner were very difficult days. He's a brilliant scientist, and I have the highest respect for his scientific mind, but as a human being, he's not a very nice person. But that makes him interesting. You don't become a journalist to seek out nice people who will say nice things to you and you write nice articles about them."
In fact, Preston's attraction to archaeology seems to have less to do with the complexity of the field itself than with the complexity of the scientists who people it.
"Archaeologists tend to be very controversial people. I've had Southwestern archaeologists say to me, quote, 'Southwestern archaeologists eat their children.' The personality conflicts, the passion, the outrageous claims and counterclaims that go on in archaeology, especially Southwestern archaeology, make for a very fertile ground for a novelist."
And, of course, so do the other themes woven into this book. The redrock canyons, about which Preston has learned the hard way, provide a setting filled with history and elemental danger. The slowly emerging role of Native American witchcraft in the plot provides a background of mystery and fear and a chance for Preston and Child to speculate about rational explanations behind what seem to be supernatural happenings--a hallmark of their scientific thrillers. It also adds another layer of cultural richness to the already complex interior world of this fast-moving tale.
But don't ask Preston to tell you if the resulting book is good. He speaks about his books with mordant humor and has never reread any of them in entirety, once they've appeared in print. "I've picked them up and read a few pages and found it so painful that I had to put them back down again," he admits. "For me, they're never really finished, and I see all kinds of problems with them that I didn't see when I submitted the manuscript. The same is true of my non-fiction books, though I must say my book Cities of Gold--I really believe it is my best book. That's the only book I can bear to reread. I have reread that book--not in its entirety--but I have read parts of it and actually derived some small enjoyment from it."
--Mark Wood
