From the Trenches - Books - The Google Tepe Code

At the 11,000-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most important finds in recent memory: circles of megalithic pillars that may be the earliest evidence of organized religion ("The World's First Temple," November/December 2008). Sadly, there is still no authoritative, popular book in English on this amazing discovery. Instead we get journalist Tom Knox's lurid thriller The Genesis Secret (Viking), a shameless Da Vinci Code clone pegged to Schmidt's discovery. The herky-jerky novel, which seems to have been inspired in large part by casual online research, follows the adventures of a British-American war correspondent as he exposes a shadowy modern conspiracy to cover up the dark truth behind the mysterious megalithic circles.

Knox is a pseudonym for British journalist Sean Thomas, author of the Internet-dating memoir Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You. He actually visited Göbekli Tepe in 2006 and wrote an article on the discovery for the Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to "weird-watching" and "anomalous" phenomena. Knox wrote that Schmidt linked the site to the Garden of Eden, a quote the archaeologist claims is a fabrication. In his acknowledgments, Knox thanks Schmidt, who is called "Franz Breitner" in the book (the character is killed off in the early going). But a sternly worded notice posted on the website of the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt's home institution, disavows any connection between the archaeologist and Knox, and insists the author distorted Schmidt's theories in his original story.

This real-world contretemps is more interesting than anything in the book, which features a string of ritual murders committed by an oddly unthreatening international cabal. The group is bent on covering up evidence that Neolithic descendants of the king-sized primate Gigantopithecus ruled over the human "cavemen" of Göbekli Tepe. Somehow this proves the Bible is a sham.

The story also features a bewildering array of plot points that seem to have been gleaned from the Internet. James Joyce, the 19th-century archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Japan's ancient Jomon people, the Kurdish Yezidi sect, Neanderthals, and a perhaps a dozen ancient torture techniques are all tossed into the novel's thin broth of a plot.

Bizarrely, all the major characters in the novel, including a detective, a journalist, a bioarchaeologist, and an Oxford archaeologist emeritus are themselves constantly using Google and Wikipedia to advance the narrative. The research, both the author's and the characters', is often lazy--the bioarchaeologist mentions that the non-existent remote-sensing technique of "magnetivity" is being used to great effect at Göbekli Tepe.

If you're interested, Knox/Thomas has set up a website detailing "the truth" behind each theme in the book. No need to include the web address here. You can Google it.