The isle of lies

Description

"The saga of Silver Bend" by J. E. Grinstead is a novel written in the early 20th century. Its opening suggests a tale of scientific hubris and moral ambiguity: an eccentric scholar steals an ancient stele and then engineers a prodigy in isolation to decipher it, only to unleash that brilliant, untutored mind into the world. The central figures are the driven scientist who orchestrates the deception, the boy he raises as a superhuman ideal, and the outsiders whose ordinary lives collide with this experiment. The opening of the novel follows Professor Reid’s account of Dr. Lepsius, who steals a Coptic-inscribed stele in Abyssinia and later vows to “make” a person able to read its last, secret words. He marries Molly O’Hara to beget a child and raises their son, Hannibal, on a remote Hebridean island under an elaborate web of lies—tutoring him to believe in flawless, godlike “Man,” pruning history and books, and staging feats to keep the boy in awe. On his nineteenth birthday Hannibal nearly deciphers the stele but falters at the final three words, then vanishes from the island as a yacht appears offshore. The scene shifts to the yacht’s maid, Jeanne Auvache, who senses a hidden watcher during a shore visit and, later in her cabin, is overpowered by a fervent young stranger who demands her promise of secrecy and marriage—revealing the first collision between the sheltered prodigy and the wider world. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Subjects

• Young men -- Fiction
• Speculative fiction
• PR