Gerard soon will find a concrete expression for his grief, for the letters on the scrap of paper are Sanskrit, oldest of the classical Indo-European languages to which our tongue belongs. The more Gerard studies the scrap retrieved from the ruined house, the "more its incomprehensibility took hold of him, and the more the incomprehensibility took hold of him the more he believed it must have a meaning."Actually the Ugaritic alphabet, based on the cuneiform (wedge) system, was a dead end and died out. It's the Phoenician alphabet that is antecedent to ours. Still, sounds like an interesting book.
Soon, he has left his wife and teaching post behind to join a similarly obsessed band of grieving parents, who are convinced that, in the mystery of the alphabet's origins -- in other words, in the very mechanism by which we set down the stories by which we live -- there is a hidden, transcendent and, perhaps, consoling meaning. Together this little band -- which includes a mother who has lost a daughter to a drug overdose, parents of a child killed by terrorists and a grief-stricken Chechen mother -- moves from Oxford to Greece, to the site of ancient Ugarit, near Latikia on the Syrian coast.
That city occupies a special place in the archaeological study of languages because it has given up not simply vast palaces and temple libraries, but also the first private manuscript collections ever found in the ancient world. Inscribed on clay tablets, the Ugarit texts comprise a polyphony of ancient Near Eastern languages -- Sumerian, Hurrian, Akkadian and Ugarit written in seven different scripts, ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Cypro-Minoan to the Ugarites' own cuneiform. The latter is thought to be the most direct antecedent of our own phonetic alphabet.
Throughout this quest, the ghosts of the phonetic pilgrims' lost loved ones hover around and it is one of the strengths of Plante's beautifully controlled prose that the reality and unreality of these specters is altogether unresolved. It once was said of James Joyce that he had rejected everything about the Scholastic Catholicism in which he was raised, except its basic principles. Plante is one of those Catholic unbelievers who has abandoned everything about his faith except that sense of the sacred to be found in its mysteries and contradictions.
The arc of "ABC's" narrative evokes deeply -- though it is unspoken -- the ancient mysticism drawn from one of the most ancient of cabalistic texts, the first century "Sefer Yetzirah," which held that The Infinite ("En Sof") was accessible through contemplation of the Hebrew alphabet itself. Meditation upon the divine through the mechanism of autonomic writing and assigning of transcendent meaning to individual letters entered the mysticism of Plante's Catholic tradition through contact with the writings of the great medieval Spanish cabalist, Abraham Abulafia.
UPDATE (24 August): Duane Smith comments at Abnormal Interests.
