As detailed in select non-fiction works like THE TURK – still one of the most enthralling, suspenseful books I’ve read – Wolfgang von Kempelen achieved fame throughout Europe in the late 1700s by inventing an automaton that could think and play chess. Thanks to the combined detective work of Edgar Allan Poe and others, it eventually was exposed as a hoax – that the “player” was operator by a person cleverly hidden in the cabinet.
But for a while, Kempelen had the world fooled. And it is this magnificent creation and subsequent deception that informs that Robert Löhr’s debut novel THE CHESS MACHINE, translated from his native German by Anthea Bell.
For dramatic purposes, Löhr highly fictionalizes the true story, bending the known characteristics of real people and conjuring up new persons entirely. Kemeplen is presented at first as a flawed but ambitious civil servant who dreams up his chess machine as a way to impress royalty, even if he’s secretly fooling them. It’s only meant to be used for the one performance, but greed gets the best of him.
That might not have been the case if he hadn’t met Tibor Scardenelli, a guilt-ridden dwarf who knows his way around the board (and the book’s bizarre, wholly sympathetic hero). He has the required skills and desperately needs the money, but the downside is that in order to continue the charade, Tibor can’t be seen in public. Thus, when he’s not holed up inside the machine, he’s a prisoner in Kemeplen’s own home.
And a happy home it’s not, with Kemeplen drawn as a sort of a cad, trapped in a loveless marriage from whose boundaries he often strays. This character flaw proves tragic when, halfway through the story, someone is murdered in a rather unusual fashion. Compounding the sensational event is that the public believes the automaton to be the prime suspect.
With this act, the men’s story turns from a series of harmless ruses to an all-out felony. And that’s when the narrative stakes are raised, with a spy planted in his home, a couple instances of blackmail and the ever-present threat of fatal revenge. Löhr’s novel is absorbing enough when the only crime being committed is dishonesty; when events escalate toward disaster, this unconventional literary mystery really shows its smarts.
I’ll resist the obvious comparison of Löhr’s storytelling skills to that of advancing pawns across the board. Besides, the translation places just enough stretch of distance between the book being deemed as brilliant and just merely great. Without that extra layer of interpretation, THE CHESS MACHINE’s vibrance might have been doubled.
But what’s there is mostly magnificent – a thinking man’s thriller brimming with politics both social and sexual. If it’s about 50 pages too long and fitted with too many endings, you’d have to forgive such a slight transgression. After all, aren’t most “good” chess matches timebusters as well? –Rod Lott
Related posts:
- The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game
- The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the Human Brain
- QUICKGASM >> 10.18.06
- The Society of S
- The Midnight Road
