In a section of The Egyptologist that’s presented as a piece of scholarly writing to be included in a forthcoming book that one of the (unreliable) narrators is planning to write about his (yet-to-be-realized) discovery of a tomb of an (apocryphal) Egyptian monarch who (perhaps) wrote a text called the Admonitions, we get this:
The author of the Admonitions may have been a king, he may have been posing as a king, he may merely have been imagining a king. Hero, fraud, or artist? I have found one’s own tendencies dictate one’s answer to that question. (87)
It’s a nice summation of some of the main concerns of the book itself: how do you get the truth from the limited evidence you have available? Or is looking for the truth not going to get you anywhere at all? If a person’s identity is a story/pack of lies/series of justifications that they’re telling to you/themselves/the world, where does that person end up? What does it mean to be a “self-made” person, especially one with dreams of immortality?
The Egyptologist is an epistolary novel, with one set of letters (and journal entries, telegraph cables, and other documents) being from the 1920s, centered around one Ralph Trilipush, who’s in Egypt looking for that aforementioned tomb, and the other being a set of letters from Harold Ferrell, a retired private investigator, to the nephew of Trilipush’s former fiancée, who’s looking to learn more about his family history. Ferrell’s story and Trilipush’s intersect, of course, though it’s convoluted: Ferrell starts by looking for an Australian soldier/amateur Egyptologist named Paul Caldwell who disappeared just at the end of World War I, and ends up convinced that Trilipush killed him. Trilipush, meanwhile, says he’s never heard of Paul Caldwell; he’s just trying to find Atum-hadu’s tomb, to make a find in the desert the likes of which no one has seen before (despite Howard Carter’s contemporaneous dig of Tutankhamen’s tomb, which comes up several times).
I liked The Egyptologist best at the end, which has a lot of dark humor about getting deeper and deeper into a lie or series of lies, and at the beginning, when I appreciated various clever/funny bits. In the middle, I felt like things rather dragged: as many people on Goodreads have noted, there’s a plot twist that’s evident rather early, and after that there’s a lot of waiting for the characters to understand/acknowledge that twist (or not, as the case may be).
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