Chess and Fiction:
A Choice of Casual or Serious 

Taylor Kingston

The Immortal Game, by Mark Coggins, 1999 Poltroon Press,
Berkeley, California, Hardcover, 309 pp., $25.00.

The L］eburg Variation, by Paolo Maurensig, translated by Jon
Rothschild, 1997 Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, Inc., New York,
Hardcover, 140 pp., $19.00.

Detective stories and murder mystery novels have been a standard
form of popular fiction for many years, since the days A. Conan
Doyle was writing about Sherlock Holmes if not before. While
chess metaphors are common in such works, those with a full-
blown, well-developed chess theme are relatively rare. Good ones
are even rarer, so when these two titles came our way, both
professing a chess motif, we were interested but skeptical.

As it turns out, the two novels make an interesting exercise in
comparison and contrast. Rarely have two books that could be
described in ostensibly similar terms been so essentially different,
both in their overall tone and their approach to chess.

The Immortal Game is a Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler-
style detective novel, on the lines of The Maltese Falcon or The
Big Sleep. It is set in present-day San Francisco, California.
August Riordan, a street-smart, wise-cracking but somewhat
disreputable private eye, is hired by a wealthy, reclusive computer
software designer to investigate the theft of some valuable
property, a revolutionary new PC program. The search leads him
through various Bay Area locales: glitzy offices and homes of
Silicon Valley CEOs, Tenderloin slums, the Castro gay district;
through various subcultures: jazz nightspots, gay bars, drag-queen
cabarets, an S&M/B&D dungeon club; and into contact with a
variety of typical film noir characters, shady and otherwise: amoral
businessmen, hired thugs, scantily-clad sexy women, transvestite
homosexuals, grumpy landladies, deadpan cops, and a beautiful
but vicious dominatrix, who variously assist, obstruct, mislead,
entice, curse, beat the crap out of, or try to kill, Riordan. Adhering
closely to the conventions of its well-established genre, the plot
goes through many turns, involving much suspense, violence, and
colorful dialogue, several murders, one suicide and a small amount
of explicit kinky sex before the final surprise twist in which the
truth comes out and justice is finally served. 

The main rewards of a hard-boiled gumshoe novel like this are the
intellectual challenge of solving of a well-devised crime mystery,
the romantic's satisfaction at seeing justice done, the cynic's
gratification at seeing his pessimistic view of humanity affirmed,
and the pulp-fiction fan's enjoyment of violent action, tough-guy
talk and pungent metaphors. Game is mostly adequate in all these
departments, particularly the last few, viz.:   

"'Riordan, you little pecker head!' he said affably. 'How the hell
are you?' 'Swell, Ben, just swell. Remember how I promised to
feed your face into the document shredder the next time you called
me a pecker head?'"

 "Parking legally in San Francisco is like trying to wedge that last
coffee cup into an already overloaded dishwasher."

"The wispy brown hair on her head was lashed to bright orange
curlers the way a prisoner is lashed to the rack. Her face ... had
enough makeup on it to protect it from re-entry into the earth's
atmosphere."

"Going by, I inhaled a lot of perfume of the sort a woman in a
chartreuse turban wears. That, or a flea bomb had gone off."

"She wore a short white dress made of neoprene rubber. It fit like a
milk bath."

"I had already decided there was more to Terri McCulloch than
Bishop's other girl friends ... Now with her tattoo, pierced nipples
and S&M accessories, it seemed even with that assessment I'd sold
Terri shorter than flea-market patio furniture."

 "She gave me the kind of stare Hitler would get at a Bar
Mitzvah."

"'I'd prefer a typewritten confession in triplicate.' 'Sure, and
people in hell want ice water.'"

"I landed a horrific punch that spread his nose like jelly on toast."

 "And Hastrup, don't ever come near me again. I'll give no more
thought to emptying a clip into you than I would peeing on a urinal
cake."

However, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with
chess? As it turns out, very little, mainly that the stolen property in
question is a GM-strength chess-playing program. It differs from,
say, Fritz or Rebel in having a somewhat higher Elo, a virtual
reality interface, and a more human playing style. The novel's title
derives from the fact that, given this position (See Diagram)

the program does not move the attacked Bishop but makes the
human-style sacrifice 11 Rg1, as Anderssen did against
Kieseritzky in 1851, in what is now called  "The Immortal Game". 

However, in writing the above paragraph we have equaled a
significant portion of the total verbiage the novel devotes to chess.
There are a few nice chess-related touches (e.g. a jazz group
named "Distant Opposition"), but overall chess is actually of rather
minor, incidental importance in Game. The protagonist doesn't
even play. The stolen property could just as well have been a key,
jewels, a tape cassette, secrets on microfilm, or any other small,
valuable object. While the story features many actual Bay Area
locales, not a one has to do with chess. If the author were seriously
attempting, as he professes, to build a chess motif, why not include
some characters based on actual local chess personalities, like, say,
the late George Koltanowski, or some serious, strong players (e.g.
Walter Browne or John Donaldson, to name only two) or real San
Francisco chess venues like the Mechanics Institute?

There is one diagram, a photograph using Isle of Lewis pieces, but
it's backwards, with a dark square at the lower right corner,
making it look like Anderssen began castling queenside and was
interrupted. Elo rating is oddly described as a "grading level." All
in all the indications are that author Coggins has a rather casual
relationship with chess, and has thrown the game in merely for
image enhancement.  

This is not to say that The Immortal Game is a bad book. While
detective fiction is not one of our favorite genres, we found this an
entertaining page-turner, with competently crafted plot and
characters, and a good surprise twist at the end. However, with a
ratio of about 10 or 20 parts sex-and-violence to every one of
chess, to say it has "a chess motif" is something like saying The
Godfather is about Italian cuisine.

That is not the case with The L］eburg Variation. Like The
Immortal Game, it too could be called a mystery novel, but it has
far more in common with the works of Vladimir Nabokov and
Stefan Zweig than with Chandler or Hammett, and it borrows far
more from the traditions of Jewish mysticism than from the
conventions of pulp fiction. The cover blurb calls it "a coolly
controlled thriller," but giving it that kind of escapist connotation
is like calling Conrad's Heart of Darkness a travelogue. While
chess could be removed from The Immortal Game without
significant loss, for The L］eburg Variation that would be like
taking the whales and ocean out of Moby Dick. Author Paolo
Maurensig, though described as an Italian businessman, is
obviously very familiar with chess and the special passions it
involves. Though the novel has not a single actual game score or
position, chess lies at its core and permeates it like blood in veins;
without chess it would be inconceivable.

The story begins in Europe some time in the latter half of the 20th
century, with the death of a wealthy Vienna businessman who also
was editor of a prominent chess magazine. He is found in the
topiary garden of his lavish country estate, dead from a gunshot
wound to the head. The how and why of his death is gradually
revealed through a series of flashbacks, telling the stories of a
young chess master named Hans Mayer, and an older man, his
teacher Tabori, a mysterious personage who rarely actually plays
chess but whose analysis of others' games is always flawless. 

Any lengthy description of the book's plot would give too much
away; we can only mention a few highlights. Mayer is trained on a
chessboard with heavy metal pieces that, amazingly, give an
electric shock when a bad move is made. Tabori's family legend
holds that centuries before it was "infused with a kind of life" by
mystical Kabbahlist means. The board also seems to impart chess
knowledge by mere contact, but it can also induce madness. Tabori
teaches Mayer a special defense to 1 d4, a complex Knight
sacrifice he calls the L］eburg variation, that 'plunges the board
into chaos,' with which Mayer scores 80% in high-level
tournaments. Tabori, we eventually learn, was as a boy in the
1920s a Reshevsky-like prodigy, and as a young man in the 1930s
a potential world champion, but he was imprisoned in a Nazi death
camp. There he was forced to play chess with a hated rival of
nearly equal strength, with the stakes nothing less than human
lives. 

Though the novel is set in modern times, it seems to take place
more in a murky, timeless land, full of mystery and foreboding. If
Immortal Game has film noir traits, L］eburg Variation's
landscape is incomparably darker, though unlike the dull
gloominess of Alekhine's Anguish (reviewed here some months
ago), it is a darkness with points of light and with meaning: a
netherworld where characters grapple with questions of inspiration
and obsession, choice and compulsion, fate and responsibility,
vengeance and justice, sanity and madness, good and evil. Chess
suffuses it all, as means, end, symbol and metaphor, all expressed
in compelling, vivid language:

"As I said, those were the early days, the most beautiful phase of
any endeavor, when everything seems like a dream. At the time I
had no idea of the price art must pay to life, the odious tribute the
ideal owes to the material."

 "I sometimes realize that I'm not absorbing what's being said
around me, as though a membrane were separating me from the
others. At that point chess is no longer an abstract presence but a
concrete entity, exactly like a diaphragm dividing me from the
world, and like a diaphragm it moves and throbs ..."   

"Like the arts, chess seems to hold out the possibility of surviving
physical death, of gaining eternal fame ... All you need is a single
game, one variation, one flash of originality."

"But you know as well as I that is not we who decide how and
when to abandon chess but chess that rules us." 

"If players are sometimes portrayed as old men with furrowed
brows, that is a merely symbolic depiction of an activity that
consumes days, years, and even lifetimes in a single, unquenchable
flame. Players relish the paradoxical compensation: time is forever
frozen in a loop of the eternal present, while life away from the
board comes to seem unbearably fast-paced. They therefore
constantly seek to rediscover that state of grace, that nebulous yet
limpid condition of dominion, that comes only from concentrating
the mind on the game. Boredom? The chess player doesn't know
the meaning of the word."

"I sensed an inner awakening to the Attention he'd spoken of so
gravely. It had even gone beyond chess, to the world around me. It
was a question of seeing instead of merely looking, a goal pursued
by many philosophers."

At times the novel seems about to digress too much into
philosophy or mysticism, and over one stretch seems in danger of
drowning in graphic depictions of Nazi atrocities (In contrast to the
action-movie-style fights in the Coggins novel, L］eburg's
violence is cold brutality, to both body and spirit.). However at
such junctures Maurensig, showing a very sure instinct, resumes
the main plot line at the point of maximum tension, or shows us
(like a chess master) that what earlier appeared to be digression
was necessary preparation. This really is an impressive literary
effort, especially considering that it is Maurensig's first book of
any kind. The final resolution is especially well done, darkly
resonant and haunting, hard yet just, with chess as an instrument of
that justice.

It is perhaps not completely fair to review these two books
together. Both could be called "detective novels" or "mystery
thrillers," but then the comedy The Front Page and the tragic
drama Citizen Kane could both be described as movies about the
newspaper business. Still, both books are well-crafted attempts,
however different, at chess-related fiction, even if in one case the
relationship is casual and in the other deeply serious. If you are
tired of trying to memorize 20-move variations in the Najdorf
Sicilian, and want a change of pace but not a complete break from
chess, either of these books would serve well. For those whose
tastes run to lighter fare, The Immortal Game will provide an
entertaining escape. For those who can stand the darkness, The
L］eburg Variation will leave a deep impression, one not easily
forgotten.