At the start of Codex, Edward, a twenty-five-year-old investment banker with an English degree from Yale, is about to take the first vacation of his working career. Not that he’s actually going anywhere: he’s about to transfer to a different position at the company he works for, in the London office rather than in New York, so he’s taking some time off to rest and pack before the trip. Or at least, that’s what he’s planning to do. But things don’t quite work out that way. He pays a visit to the apartment of a pair of very wealthy clients because his boss asks him to, and learns that his boss has volunteered him to help these clients, the Wents, also known as the Duke and Duchess of Bowmry, with a project. The project turns out to be unpacking and cataloging their library, which was sent from England to New York before WWII, but hasn’t been touched in sixty years. He’s told to keep an eye out, in particular, for anything by a writer from the 1300s named Gervase of Langford, specifically a book called A Viage to the Contree of the Cimmerians. Edward is baffled and annoyed, but finds himself unexpectedly sucked in by the work.
So that he’ll have some idea of what he’s looking for, Edward visits a rare book library that has a work by Gervase of Langford in its collection, but on the day he goes, someone else is using it. He ends up finding and talking to that person, who’s a medievalist named Margaret, and hires her to help him with the cataloging project. She tells him that the specific book he’s looking for is actually a hoax, a document put out by an eighteenth-century printer who claimed it contained fragments of a medieval text, but who actually wrote the thing himself. And then things get weird: Edward is told by Laura, the Bowmrys’ assistant, that the Duke has decided to stop looking for the book, and, indeed, to stop the whole project of cataloging the library. Margaret, having seen the library, talks Edward into letting her keep the key to it. And the Duchess calls Edward separately, telling him to find the book as soon as he can, without letting the Duke know he’s still looking for it.
Alongside this plot of Edward and Margaret and the Viage, as they call it, there’s another plot, as Edward finds himself unexpectedly sucked in to a computer game called MOMUS, which he’s introduced to by a friend from college. The game has single-player and multi-player modes, and parts of it remind Edward weirdly of the plot of the Viage, which Margaret has explained to him, or of bits of things he sees in his search for it. As he’s playing MOMUS, Edward gets stuck, and his attempt to get unstuck in the game is what gets him unstuck in the search for the Viage, too.
And there’s more, plotwise: the possibility of the Viage containing a hidden encrypted message, the question of why the Duchess still wants to find it and the Duke doesn’t, doubts about the Duchess’s sanity, and potential for betrayal/double-crossing all around. The way the book picks up speed as all this is revealed is what made me enjoy it: after a slow start, I was willing to let myself be caught up in the story. The images of scenes from MOMUS and from the Viage are also pleasing, and while I didn’t love this book, I liked it more by the end than I did at the beginning.
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