Maybe wears its influences a little heavily on its sleeve but is otherwise very fine indeed. ( )

There is a lot of curious trivia here but the end result is so all-over-the-place it is hard to see what sort of reader will be completely satisfied.

A novel with a narrator who is an 800-year-old transmutable book seems like a set up for a voyage through an almost millennium-length view of history. Instead, the story mostly centres on the late 20th century life and Cold-War career of a British spy named Roger and occasionally his wife Margery as viewed by "John" the book.

It is especially tempting to interpret the use of a detail from the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" from the school of Pieter Bruegel the Elder as a metaphor for the novel. In the painting, a ploughman (shown in the book cover detail) is the main character in the foreground and the actual drowning of Icarus from falling into the sea is a small detail in the background (not even shown on the book cover). Roger's mostly mundane life is thus in the foreground of the novel and the imagined epic life of "John" the book is mostly left in the background.

There are some intriguing snapshots of "John's" history such as when it has an encounter with another example of its species. That seems to set up the possibility of a non-bibliographic interpretation with the idea of an alien species at the forefront. That idea is never explored though.

There is an odd digression with an almost blow by blow description of an historic chess match as played by Thomas Bowdler (yes, the one who published the censored Shakespeare) vs. Henry Seymour Conway as replayed by Roger with one of his Russian contacts. The historic game itself can be viewed here.

All of it is a curiosity that likely won't completely satisfy fans of epic historical fiction, spy fiction, science fiction, or of chess games but will at least intrigue each of them to some degree. ( )