Mondays Book Talk - The Source

Written by MikeH

The Source by Michael Cordy 

While browsing one day at my local book store, I happened to catch sight of The Source, an adventure thriller by author Michael Cordy. Born in Accra, the capital of Ghana, he spent much of his childhood between West and East Africa, India and Cyprus. Often criticized for “imitating” Dan Brown’s work, Cordy actually started his career as a writer before Brown: the proof, his first novel “The Miracle Strain” was published in 1997. 

The Source combines adventure and action with constant themes of science versus religion, and Man's quest to understand the past and the mystery of our existence. The slow start really sets the scene and introduces the characters so you can become familiar with them and their motives before the action begins.

The story is based on the Voynich Manuscript, a real document which is thought to have been written between 1450 and 1520 and remains undeciphered to this day despite the many attempts to unravel its mysteries. It is hand-written and contains a number of mysterious drawings of strange plants and animals. But returning to The Source: the Geologist Ross Kelly has it all, a lucrative career searching for oil across the world and a beautiful, brilliant wife, Lauren, pregnant with their first child. But when Lauren, a Yale academic, deciphers the university’s mysterious Voynich Manuscript, which has confounded experts for centuries, everything changes.

An attempt to steal the translation leaves Lauren and their unborn child in coma, and her husband Ross in deep despair. Encounters with the sinister Vatican priest Torino and then a mysterious nun, convince Ross to find the centuries-old manuscript, which chronicles the ill-fated discovery of a mythic and fabulous garden, deep in the Amazonian jungle by the Spanish conquistadors in the XVI century: an Eden so terrible and miraculous which could rewrite the book of Genesis defying all reason. 

Unfortunately, Ross and his travelling fellows are not alone in their quest of the Eden. Torino is also seeking the garden, in order to exploit it and bring glory to the Vatican as a result. He will stop at nothing to achieve his aims and even hires the services of an infamous contract killer to help him. They track Ross and his party on their way to the garden, with terrible consequences. 

Ross eventually finds the garden that is described in the manuscript and is astonished to discover that it is indeed as amazing as the translation led him to believe. More importantly a light-emitting monolith - called 'The Source' in Lauren's translation, believed to be the origin of all life on earth - is contained within the garden. Ross and his team are keen to preserve the garden and continue to keep it secret, while the priest wants to destroy it, as he considers it a threat to the authority of The Church, and to take The Source, with its miraculous healing powers, as a gift for Rome.

Definitely, this is a thrilling and well researched story. In my opinion, it shows that Michael Cordy did extensive research of most of the topics to create a brilliant thriller. One interesting aspect to explore within this book is the reflection about how we, as human, are actually destroying our own world, driven by greed or by fanatic religious convictions. I strongly recommend The Source for all those who are passionate about mystery, action, conspiracy theories and history. 

Image: Provided by Author.