"... three inches long, and unchewed." Taylor Kingston Alekhine's Anguish, by Charles Yaffe, 1999 McFarland & Co., Jefferson, North Carolina, Softcover, 194 pp., $21.00 This reviewer has long been a lover of historical fiction. Films such as Becket or A Man for All Seasons, and novels such as Gore Vidal's Julian and Lincoln, Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Count Belisarius, or Herman Wouk's Winds of War, along with other well-researched, well-written works based on actual historic figures, have provided me many hours of enjoyment and education. However, historical novels with a famous chess master as protagonist are few and far between. Only two come immediately to mind: Frances Parkinson Keyes' The Chess Players (1960), based on the life of Paul Morphy, and Filiberto Terraza's El Aguila CaĦda (The Fallen Eagle), about Mexican master Carlos Torre. Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946), world chess champion 1927- 1935 and 1937-1946, would seem to offer a promising subject for this sort of work. Besides being one of the greatest chess players of all time, he lived an unusually dramatic, controversial life, involving two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes, and most of the major chess events and personalities of the first half of the 20th century. With this raw material, it would seem hard to write a dull book on Alekhine. The lurid cover of Alekhine's Anguish, resembling a Bela Lugosi Dracula movie poster, at first aroused fears of dime-novel sensationalism, but those proved unfounded. Instead of a contrived thriller, we have a contrived yawner, and rather a downer, a mostly unpleasant morality play. The novel is the work of Charles Yaffe, a retired public health official from California (and not to be confused with Russian- American chess master Charles Jaffe, who died in 1941). The story begins with the August 1914 internment of Alekhine and other foreign masters playing in Mannheim, Germany at the start of World War I. It proceeds through several high (and low) points of his life and career, and ends with his 1946 death in Portugal. The story line adheres roughly to historical fact, but with many major and minor exceptions. Lasker is said to have beaten Capablanca in the last round of St. Petersburg 1914; in fact it was the last but one. Capablanca's score at London 1922 is misreported. Capablanca is depicted as dying from a fit induced by a 1941 newspaper article in which Alekhine defamed him; in fact he died in 1942 without any Alekhine involvement. One of Alekhine's four marriages is unmentioned. Alekhine is depicted as drunkenly absent from chess for a year after losing his title to Euwe in December 1935; in fact he was mostly sober and active in 1936 tournaments. In the novel he spends most of WW I in Portugal to avoid military service; in fact he returned to Russia in October 1914 and did see combat- zone service with a hospital unit. A completely fictitious major character, Antonio Lupi, chess champion of Portugal, is invented to see triple-duty as Alekhine's best friend, match second, and main literary foil. Since this is a novel, such divergences from the historical record are permissible and perhaps unimportant. However, it should be noted that wherever Yaffe varies significantly, it is almost always to portray Alekhine in a worse light than facts warrant. Whatever the mix of fact and fiction, for a novel like this to work they must combine to produce an interesting story involving well- depicted characters. While Yaffe is a competent writer, his background is in technical and expository writing, not dramatic fiction. Thus his style is rather gray and flat, with only occasional color and life. Perhaps only one scene has any real dramatic tension, one wherein Alekhine must undergo questioning by Lenin and beat him at chess to avoid execution. Only one bit of the plot, about machinations to get Alekhine released from Germany, shows much ingenuity. The dialogue is generally pedestrian: "Ready for dinner, Alex?" "No, I'm not going down. I'll order something from room service." "Be sure you do," Lupi said, aware of the ever-present tumbler of brandy in Alex's hand. "Some solid food would do you good." "I will, don't worry." "Should I come back later to review the game with you?" "Not tonight. I think I'll turn in early." Scintillating, what? Occasionally Yaffe shows some flair for metaphor, e.g. "Capa's games looked as though they were turned out by a lathe, while [Alekhine's] resembled something produced with a mallet and chisel", but such flashes are too few, and they are outweighed by what may be the most ludicrous ending in chess literature: "He choked to death because of a piece of meat stuck in his throat. It was three inches long, and unchewed." God, what a parting line! Gone With the Wind is remembered for "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.", King Richard III for "My kingdom for a horse!", and now Alekhine's Anguish joins that illustrious company with "three inches long, and unchewed." Well, gag me with a sirloin. That is, I believe, historically accurate, but as a final sentence for a supposedly serious novel this belongs only in the Lord Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Competition. Either absent from the book, or mentioned only in passing, are many of the most interesting chess personalities of Alekhine's time, such as Tartakower, Emanuel Lasker, Nimzovitch, Keres, and Botvinnik, to name a few. And only one character, the fictitious Lupi, has any real depth. Major figures show up only as stereotypes: Capablanca a regally aloof, suave narcissist, Marshall a cigar-puffing good old boy, Euwe a well-mannered non-entity. The protagonist fares little better. A good novelist can breathe life into a character with a single paragraph, yet after nearly 200 pages Yaffe's Alekhine remains a cardboard construct; we are almost never allowed into his head. Aside from chess and foreign languages, he is portrayed as having two other talents. The first is mendacity: Yaffe's Alekhine lies like a traffic signal changes color. His other talent is sexual technique. He goes through three wives and several mistresses, all of them well into middle age or beyond, who have all either never known or forgotten what an orgasm feels like until "Alex" comes along. Apparently this is the author's attempt to round out Alekhine, to show the man behind the chess player, but he does not really establish character, he just assigns traits. Alekhine never becomes real to the reader, and thus we feel no joy at his successes, nor any pity, loss or satisfaction at his downfall. Most seriously, while we stay well informed on Alekhine's sex life, we get little insight, real or fictitious, into what made him a great chess player. Despite the book's subtitle "A Novel of the Chess World" we don't even see him playing much chess. There is not one actual game score or diagram in the entire book, and only minimal descriptions of a few games. Perhaps the author did not want to bore non-playing readers with too much chess detail, but he falls between two stools: not enough chess for fans of the game, yet little else to hold a non-player's interest. Mostly we just observe Alekhine on a long, slow downward spiral of drinking, lying, hypocrisy, short-sighted decisions and callous use of those close to him, until he ends up dying alone, miserable and despised. More than anything else this book is a sermon that says "It is bad to be a self-centered manipulative alcoholic liar who seduces women for their money." While I endorse that moral stance, and agree that Alekhine did in many ways fit that description, the theme's drab, grim treatment makes for rather bleak reading. In contrast, novels such as Burr and 1876 by Gore Vidal have shown that sordid characters can provide very colorful reading when skillfully portrayed. Too little of that skill is in evidence here. It is somewhat surprising that this book should be put out by McFarland & Co., which in the area of chess has in recent years produced almost nothing but excellent works, including, ironically, the outstanding Alexander Alekhine's Chess Games, 1902-1946. In that book's foreword, Alekhine's son wrote "The private life of Alekhine will not be found in this book ... His definitive chess biography has yet to be published ...". Perhaps Alekhine's Anguish was an attempt to fill that void; if so it was an ill-advised decision, and the void was better left empty for the time being. One hopes that this gloomy novel does not deter a good biographer from eventually making the attempt.