Jan’s Place

Imbricate - v. tr.

To overlap in a regular pattern.

v. intr.

To be arranged with regular overlapping edges.

[Latin imbrictus, covered with roof tiles, from imbrex, imbric-, roof tile, from imber, imbr-, rain.]

While Howard Carter unearths Tutankhamen’s tomb to world acclaim, Ralph Trilipush, a British archeologist, descends into madness in a nearby ruin, searching for the lost tomb of Atum-hadu (”Atum-is-aroused”), the purported author of a series of laughable erotic poems that Trillipush has “translated” and read to tittering audiences and fuming scholars. Trillipush is the eternal deluded optimist, a successful con man mainly because he is his own best mark. His story is paralleled by that of Harold Ferrell, an Australian private investigator hired to trace down a man who seems to have been killed in Egypt hunting for Trilipush’s lost pharoah. When the pharoah’s story begins to have uncanny connections to Trilipush’s own, you realize you are in strange and shifting sands indeed.

The Egyptologist is unrelenting in its choice of seedy, disreputable, and pathetic characters who possess an equally unrelenting and cheerful refusal to see things as they are. In the middle of the novel, with layers of deception unraveling, the pervasive tawdriness becomes extremely depressing. It’s almost painful to see the story unfold; at times I found the book intensely uncomfortable to read in its unremitting depiction of self-deception, but humor rises out of the seeping lies and deceit - the kind where events become so absurd that you can only laugh. As the book draws to a close, the reader finally surveys the whole mess from above, and the resulting view is deeper and sadder, a story of class divisions blossoming into madness. This is a minor masterpiece in an intense and disconcerting genre - I’ll call it humorous clinical insanity, and be relieved it’s not widely done, though it’s rarely done better than this.