In Walter H. Hunt’s A Song in Stone, Ian Graham is just another unemployed, second-rate celebrity until he goes to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland to do a TV episode. After experiencing a humming tone only he could hear, Ian falls—literally—into the year 1307. Through holy visions, Ian learns that he must partake in a pilgrimage as a Templar to free the “healing music of Rosslyn” that only he can hear.
Hunt’s novel is far from perfect, and reads more like a failing television show episode than a stand alone story. Although set seven hundred years apart, Hunt makes his characters in both times similar in appearance and name, much like the cliché of time-travel episodes on TV. Of course the author realizes how absurd this is, and haphazardly tries to justify the similarities, but falls short.
In an extremely inexperienced manner, Hunt repeatedly (I counted three) mentioned how the tale is best served as a blockbuster film, reaffirming my belief that the author watched The Da Vinci Code and Timeline back to back and thought merging the two would make him rich and famous like Dan Brown and Michael Crichton, respectively (if the name Rosslyn Chapel seems familiar, it’s because it was the location of the final chapters in The Da Vinci Code).
Along with mentioning the idea of a silver screen adaptation, the author seems to enjoy having the narrator express that his adventures are better suited as a novel or costume drama than real life. This is not the witty play on self-reference that the author thought it was, but rather just a snag that pulls the reader away from the story.
If the obtuse hints at a film adaptation weren’t enough, A Song in Stone also suffers from massive plot holes that are sometimes too vast to ignore. When Ian gets sent back to 1307 he is put into the body of a Templar that looks exactly like him. He knows the language of the time and place and thus has trouble expressing himself in modern terms, at least at first. Hunt goes to great pains to explain the limit in language, only to completely ignore it a quarter of the way through the novel. Near the end of A Song in Stone the author decides to bring this aspect back, but it is already too late.
While this novel is written at a level designed for quick consumption, I found myself hard-pressed to finish it as I neared the end. The repetitive nature of the pilgrimage the narrator is on, combined with killing off the main villain with a quarter of the book to spare, makes the ending anticlimactic at best. If the narrator is intended to have with so many character flaws and annoyances, one might be concerned with his adventure to return to his own time, but this is not the case. Even so, a reader who makes it to the end of the novel with interest will be disappointed at the complete copout that returns Ian to his own time.
The beginning of A Song in Stone is entertaining, save for the obvious similarities to popular novels, but it doesn’t take long for it to stray. The story becomes painfully repetitive before Hunt tries to add plot twists and revelations. The end of the novel seems more like an addition to wrap everything up than a planned conclusion. Overall, this novel reeks of hoped grandeur and inexperience. A reader interested in a novel of this sort needs only to browse the shelves of bookstores to find similar incarnations of The Da Vinci Code that are much more entertaining.
