Relic was
published in 1995 but I have only just got around to reading it. Oh well,
better late than never. I must admit that although the joint authorial names
sounded vaguely familiar I hadn’t actually read anything by them before
(individually or collectively). They have collaborated on a dozen novels now,
but this was their first.
The basic plot sounds very familiar. Archaeologists steal
items from a legendary lost Amazonian tribe despite dire warnings of a curse
and terrible vengeance falling upon them. Said archaeologists are duly killed
or disappear in short order, but their loot is delivered to the New York Museum
of Natural History, within which the story unfolds. People start being savagely
killed, allegedly by some strange and powerful beast lurking in the Museum’s
ancient sub-basements, and a link with the Amazonian loot begins to be
suspected. Naturally, the heroes of the story – Margo Green, a postgrad
researcher, FBI agent Pendergast, and Sergeant D’Agosta of the NYPD – take the
threat seriously and try to warn those in charge but they are, of course,
ignored, with gruesome consequences. So
far so routine, although to be fair the plot might not have been quite so
well-worn when this story was written. Anyway, there are one or two unexpected
twists before the end: the death of a character who had seemed to be in line
for a romantic involvement with Ms Green, and a major development in the final
chapter.
The style of the book is rather breathless, packed with
chapters averaging only seven pages long, with some a lot shorter. The
characters tend to be good or bad, with little subtlety in their development;
at times it feels more like reading a film script than a novel. Dan Brown has
since brought this practice to a fine art, but Lincoln and Child write
noticeably better. There is something of
a mismatch between the fast-paced writing and the occasional and rather
indigestible chunks of scientific explanation, but these do at least keep the
story (just about) in the SF rather than fantasy camp.
Relic is more of
a pot-boiler than a ground-breaker, but it passed the time agreeably enough on
a long trans-Atlantic flight.