{"id":10134,"date":"2006-02-02T08:52:23","date_gmt":"2006-02-02T13:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/02\/02\/10134.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:50","slug":"book-report-the-vesuvius-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/02\/02\/book-report-the-vesuvius-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Vesuvius Club"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonsays.com\/content\/book.cfm?sid=33&amp;pid=511456\">The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff<\/a> is just that. It isn&#8217;t a surprise to discover that the author, Mark Gatiss, is a Doctor Who fiend. It has that sort of manic craziness, particularly in a scene when the bad guys put on ritual robes and masks and chant &#8220;Sacred Flame! Sacred Fire! Sacred Flame! Sacred Fire!&#8221; for no apparent reason. No, well, that&#8217;s not what they chant, but the point is the same, I think. Also the bit where the bad guy&#8217;s futuristic Victorian Device for destroying the world relies on, well, it isn&#8217;t important, but it&#8217;s entirely preposterous. Particularly nice, though, is the ability to tell, from the console where the Doctor (er, I mean Lucifer Box) takes control, just how far along the steam tube the bomb capsule has traveled. There&#8217;s also a great deal of polymorphous perversity, of the sort one doesn&#8217;t actually find in Doctor Who episodes, but which somehow wouldn&#8217;t seem altogether out of place, either.\n<p>It&#8217;s entertaining stuff, although not very filling, if you know what I mean. Also, Mr. Gatiss has set up some jokes that he never carries through with. Our Hero is a painter\/assassin, working with the Royal Academy of Art, which doubles as a sort of secret police, with Joshua Reynolds (not that Joshua Reynolds, alas) as spymaster. Which is great, but then the whole painter part drops out of the book, and when Mr. Box goes to Naples to uncover the Mystery of the Vesuvius Club, he doesn&#8217;t come up against his opposite number in the Italian painter\/assassin organization. Ah, well. At any rate, much fun.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff is just that. It isn\u2019t a surprise to discover that the author, Mark Gatiss, is a Doctor Who fiend. It has that sort of manic craziness, particularly in a scene when the bad&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17675,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10134\/revisions\/17675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}