The Dante Club
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| Author | Matthew Pearl |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Mystery novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Released | 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 372 pp (first edition hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-375-50529-6 |
The Dante Club is the first novel by Matthew Pearl. The book reached #1 on several best seller lists (Including Border's, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe) and appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List. It fits into the genre of fictional mystery.
The plot is largely fictional, although the main characters are real, as are many of their biographical details. Supporting and background characters, as well as those directly involved with the murders are largely fictional.
[edit] Plot summary
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The Dante Club begins with the murder of fictional State Supreme Court Justice Healey, who avoided helping stop or supporting the Danteans from translating, ("The Great Refuser/Neutral" ) hit in the head and then left out in his garden to be eaten alive by strategically placed maggots. A series of murders later occur- a fictional priest named Elisha Talbot, who accepted money ("Simonaic") from the Harvard Corporation trying to stop the translation of Dante in America, in order to write and discredit Dante, is buried upside-down and his feet are set aflame. Phinneas Jennison, a wealthy contributor to the Harvard Corp. , and friend to the translators at the same time ("Schismatic") is sliced open exactly down the middle- all killed in extreme and undeniable resemblance to the punishments of people in Dante's Hell Inferno. ..
Members of the Dante Club (A group of poets translating Dante into English), including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, J.T. Fields and James Russell Lowell, notice the Dantesque fashion of the murders, and set out to solve them, as they fear that revealing the truth will ruin Dante in America, thus making their translation a failure. Eventually, the criminal is discovered to be a soldier from the Civil War named, "DAN TEal", who, driven partly mad by the trauma of his war experiences, hears George Washington Greene (Another Dante Club member) giving sermons on Dante. Becoming convinced that Dante alone understood the need for perfect justice in the world, the soldier took it upon himself to release Hell's punishments and 'purify' the city. His motivation was solely to protect Dante. Teal finds his victims while over hearing their involvement in the stopping of the translations (which become their respective sins). The club would eventually try to capture him, with the aid of Boston's first Negro policeman (Nicholas Rey)(the only other that saw the connection), while attempting to punish Dr. Manning(Harvard Corp. Pres.) and Pliny Mead (a student of the Dante course who helped betray his teacher by cooperating with Manning)for their involvement in the Dante ban "The Traitors", but he flees. They later encounter him as he tries to round up the translators, to punish them for not embracing his "work". Dr. Manning (saved by Longfellow, Holmes, Rey, Lowell, and Fields) realizes the situation as he recovered from his attempted punishment(buried naked in ice), sees Teal on the street with a gun to Longfellow, and ends the murderer's life, thus returning the city back to normal.
