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A review by brettt
Knights of the Black and White by Jack Whyte
1.0
Modern thriller writers get more wrong about the Bible and church history than almost any other subject, but the history of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, usually known as the Knights Templar or the Templars, runs a close second.
Jack Whyte, in Knights of the Black and White, manages to combine wild speculation about both into a didactic series of lectures that sinks what starts as a pretty fun medieval adventure. Whyte suggests that Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templars, created the order as a cover for his real work, which was excavating the Temple of Solomon for the secret Order of the Rebirth of Sion of which he was a member. The Order guards secret knowledge handed down for thousands of years, which proves that Jesus was human, Paul was an evil manipulator, and that most everything the official church teaches is false. History records the names of only a few of the original nine Templars and records almost nothing of de Payens beyond his birth in France somewhere around 1070 and his death in 1136. A tabula this rasa makes an excellent canvas for pseudo-history, and Whyte borrows liberally from the discredited Michael Baigent/Richard Leigh theses of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in doing so. That would be no problem if he didn't insist on lecturing through his characters' mouths every couple of chapters about biblical scholarship, theology, morals and the like, and making a new shocking! revelation in between.
Whyte can write some wonderful passages, as when his knights excavate an ancient chamber built exactly like one of their meeting-houses, but he's so consumed with showing why Everything You've Ever Known is Wrong that he kills any enjoyment he may have earlier developed. Get 50 pages or so from the end of Knight and grit your teeth and promise yourself you'll slog through to the finish. Then remember it's the first of a trilogy and toss it into the book donation pile.
Original available here.
Jack Whyte, in Knights of the Black and White, manages to combine wild speculation about both into a didactic series of lectures that sinks what starts as a pretty fun medieval adventure. Whyte suggests that Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templars, created the order as a cover for his real work, which was excavating the Temple of Solomon for the secret Order of the Rebirth of Sion of which he was a member. The Order guards secret knowledge handed down for thousands of years, which proves that Jesus was human, Paul was an evil manipulator, and that most everything the official church teaches is false. History records the names of only a few of the original nine Templars and records almost nothing of de Payens beyond his birth in France somewhere around 1070 and his death in 1136. A tabula this rasa makes an excellent canvas for pseudo-history, and Whyte borrows liberally from the discredited Michael Baigent/Richard Leigh theses of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in doing so. That would be no problem if he didn't insist on lecturing through his characters' mouths every couple of chapters about biblical scholarship, theology, morals and the like, and making a new shocking! revelation in between.
Whyte can write some wonderful passages, as when his knights excavate an ancient chamber built exactly like one of their meeting-houses, but he's so consumed with showing why Everything You've Ever Known is Wrong that he kills any enjoyment he may have earlier developed. Get 50 pages or so from the end of Knight and grit your teeth and promise yourself you'll slog through to the finish. Then remember it's the first of a trilogy and toss it into the book donation pile.
Original available here.