Fantastic Metropolis

The Jerusalem Quartet, though a far more ambitious work, has a worthy precursor in Quin’s Shanghai Circus, and the writing and storytelling is of a very high caliber. Story elements of Quin’s Shanghai Circus are revisited in the larger work. For instance, Adzard’s study of oriental pornography is echoed in the Jerusalem sequence by Strongbow’s study of Levantine sex. The harrowing description of the massacre of Smyrna in Sinai Tapestry recalls the presentation of the rape of Nanking. Johann Luigi Szondi’s walking tour of the Levant and Strongbow’s long pilgrimage in the desert are variants of Adzard’s wanderings along the old silk routes of Asia.

The Jerusalem Quartet I: Sinai Tapestry

Now we come to Whittemore’s masterwork—a wildly imaginative sequence of books that encompasses the history of Eastern Europe and the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s, with occasional forays into the more distant past. Jerusalem is the focal geographical location for the entire sequence. Jerusalem, the once and future city, “everyone’s holy city,” the quintessential locale for dreams.

The first book in the quartet, Sinai Tapestry (1977), sets the scene, introduces the main characters, and forms the background for the rest of the quartet. The events and characters introduced in Sinai Tapestry affect the other books in the sequence, sometimes as legendary personages such as Strongbow and Skanderbeg Wallenstein, others like Joe O’Sullivan Beare and Stern as part of the ongoing action. Various objects reappear throughout the quartet, and are used as recurring motifs. A magnifying glass carried by Strongbow in his travels across the Levant reappears later in Menelik Ziwar’s possession. Strongbow’s portable bronze sundial is a chiming time piece in the background of the great Jerusalem poker game. The giant scarab used by Joe to transport arms was also used by Strongbow as a seat during the period when he was writing his massive study of Levantine sex and again used by Menelik Ziwar to smuggle the 33 volumes of the work into Egypt. These objects resonate with a profound, haunting significance, giving an impression of the continuance of time, warped and occurring in several centuries at once.

The characters are larger than life, though not caricatures. Their lives are extraordinary, almost mythic, often tragic. For each of them, Jerusalem represents a dream for the future, yet they are haunted by its past.

Sinai Tapestry begins with the story of Plantagenet Strongbow, born into an earldom in nineteenth-century England. Whittemore lampoons the lifestyle of the English landed gentry with a description of Strongbow’s family traditions, which are eccentric to the point of extreme silliness. Strongbow, however, goes against the grain and becomes a giant, in stature as well as in esoteric scholarship. His eccentricities are considerably more offensive to conventional Victorian England than those of his forebears, and there is nothing silly about them. They are awesome, enormously accomplished, and contribute to his mythic status. He is a master swordsman, the greatest botanist and explorer of his age. His masterwork is the thirty-three volume study of Levantine sex which, though banned upon publication, continues to influence the lives of other characters throughout the four books. The Sarahs in Jerusalem Poker have a copy of it and read it for light relief at the end of a hard day running the banking business of the House of Szondi.

The other book that has enormous importance in the novels (especially the first two) is the original Bible, found by Skanderbeg Wallenstein in St.Catherine’s monastery, a find that launches Wallenstein into the gargantuan task of rewriting it, creating a master forgery that eventually becomes the possession of Czar Alexander of Russia. The original Bible is a scandalous document purportedly written by an imbecile from stories told by a blind man, a catalogue of wonders which “denied every religious truth ever held by anyone”.

Strongbow’s exploits provide a constant thread in the first three books of the quartet, and various generations of the Wallenstein family influence the course of events and interweave with the lives of several of the main characters. Strongbow’s son Stern unites the entire sequence, as his dream of a homeland for Muslims, Christians, and Jews draws him into the ambit of the other characters and affects their lives in turn. To Haj Haran, he is a manifestation of God; to Joe O’Sullivan Beare he is a friend and also the reminder of a tragic September day spent in Smyrna; to Maud he is a savior who assuages her despair when Sivi dies and who remains a staunch companion and dear friend till the day of his death. Stern himself asks little of anyone, and the sadness and desperation of his physical existence never once dulls his bright idealism nor deflects him from pursuing his hopeless cause even though “his cause had been reduced to a question of smuggling guns and nothing more”. The mystery of Stern’s life and death provides the focus of the third novel, Nile Shadows, when the reader finally learns of all his disguises and his place in thirty years of events in the Middle East.

Sinai Tapestry also introduces Joe O’Sullivan Beare, on the run from the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland, fleeing to the Holy Land in the guise of a nun of the Poor Clares. There he is befriended by a mysterious character known as the baking priest who equips him with the uniform of an officer of the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade and finds him accommodation in the Home for Crimean War Heroes. Joe in turn befriends Haj Harun, a gentle dealer in antiquities, apparently 3000 years old who is probably the most endearing of all the characters. To Haj Haran, time is meaningless: he has existed, exists, and will exist through all time in his beloved city. In his past life, he has been a stone carver specializing in winged lions for the Assyrians, a landscape gardener under the Babylonians, a tentmaker under the Persians, an all-night grocer when the Greeks were in power, and a waiter during the Roman occupation. In the nineteenth century, he knew both Strongbow and Skanderbeg Wallenstein. He recalls Strongbow writing his study of Levantine sex one afternoon in the last century, and he sells Wallenstein the parchment for his forgery of the original Bible and is the sole witness to the Bible’s hiding place.