The Loch WorldCat • LibraryThing • Google Books • BookFinder
Let me start by saying that this is a very entertaining book. It’s a real page turner, and I read it over the space of about 36 hours. There, now I’ve got most of the good stuff out of the way.
How can you make a book about the Loch Ness Monster even more ridiculous? Why, you get the Knights Templar involved, that’s how. Not only that, but you create a super-secret Scottish subset of the sect, and make them Nessie’s keepers. Tie all of this in with a mixture of real and made-up Scottish history (with appearances by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce), and you have one far-fetched piece of fiction.
There are a couple of recurrent annoyances in this book. One is that every chapter is fronted by one or a few (mostly real, I suppose) quotes from people who claim to have seen Nessie. There are only so many ways that one can describe a fleeting sight of something that appears to be a large aquatic serpent, and they’re all covered in the first few chapters. The second annoyance comes in the form of recurring entries from the diary of an early Templar. The diary has been “translated” in a pseudo-modern-Scottish dialect, and is printed in a hard-to-read Old English font.
If you skim the quotes and the diary entries, then this can be an enjoyable — albeit ridiculous and historically inaccurate — read.
Mom
January 10, 2006 at 1:57 pmThis mirrors my experience of the book. It’s a “tater tot” book — it resembles the real thing and has some of the taste of the real thing, but little of the nutritional value. One is ashamed to have enjoyed it and can only recommend it as “good junk.”