Pyramid, by Tom Martin [Book Review]

This book was really bad, for several reasons.

First of all, the style in which the book was written was a really childish one, as if it was underestimating the reader’s intelligence. There was a lot of beating around the bush, pretty obvious foreshadowing and tons of really badly or cliche constructed sentences (the last one might have been a bit due to the translation too, though). All clues were hinting to a certain direction, yet the action took quite some time to take off. The plot itself was quite simplistic and predictable. It sort of resembled that of a typical episode of the series Relic Hunter (which I used to love some years ago) – only it was much, much worse and felt suited for those action novels thirteen year-old kids who just discovered the joys of reading would read.

Second of all, the characters were really typical and bland. For some Oxford professors, both Catherine and James were terribly stupid. Whenever clues were presented, they went all ‘Oh’, ‘Wow’ and ‘Amazing’, believing everything blindly, without checking a second or third source, yet rarely being able to analyze the clues further (when you, as a reader, pretty much understood where they were leading to). The rest of the characters – Bezumov, Hernan, Poimandres, the secretary and the senator – were all one dimensional, stereotypical, lacked actual motives or had really weak ones and seemed there only to advance the plot. Poimandres especially felt like a Deux ex Machina device, since he came out of nowhere, explained a lot and then got out of the plot by becoming useless through his wounds.

Third of all, what this book both reeked with, yet lacked at the same time, was documentation. A lot of the data the author gathered seemed quite forced, tempered with and purely invented. Sure, I as a reader get the idea that all these pieces of information need to lead somewhere, yet it is still annoying when they are presented as pieces of absolute evidence and nobody ever questions them. If everything was so obvious and easy to discover (as easy as it was for Catherine and James, who really didn’t seem like intelligent fellows) then why hadn’t anyone except the Corporation and Bezumov & the Professor discovered them yet?

Fourth of all, there was sooo much talk about an ancient technology without actually explaining how that had been possible, that you could really feel that the author had absolutely no idea himself how that worked and simply avoided giving any details about it. This became terribly annoying whenever the idea that the Great Pyramid was an ancient machine popped up. What did that machine do? How was it controlled and which principles was it using? There were only vague answers to this. I would have preferred the author to have avoided the idea completely instead of doing it half-assed like this.

To conclude with, this book really isn’t worth the time and effort. The ending pretty much proved that – no conclusion was reached, bad guys were destroyed, good guys won without actually having done anything. Oh yeah, and guy got the girl.

***

Review written on Goodreads back in 2011.

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