Books: The Man in the Automaton

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KINGKILL

by THOMAS GAVIN

398 pages. Random House. $10.

In 1826 a German flimflam man named Johann Nepomuk Maelzel appeared in the U.S. and began wowing the natives with his traveling show of mechanical marvels. His treasures included an automated trumpet player, a device called the panharmonicon that could duplicate the sound of a 40-piece orchestra (playing Beethoven) and an elaborate diorama showing the burning of Moscow. But Maelzel's star attraction was a hoax: a chess automaton nicknamed the Turk that took on all comers—and was every bit as talented as the human player cleverly concealed within it. That role was filled by William Schlumberger, an Alsatian hunchback who, until hitching up with Maelzel, was the second best chess player at the Café de la Régence in Paris. The machine might have conned its way across the country save for a brilliant detective named Edgar Allan Poe, who exposed the secret in 1836. Maelzel and Schlumberger both died two years later.

So much is history. First Novelist Thomas Gavin, 36, reopens this long-closed case with a single question: What if Schlumberger did not die when the newspapers claimed but lived on in obscurity, composing a private journal of his bizarre life? If such a document existed, it might tell something worth hearing about a chess genius who mysteriously elected to spend twelve years playing inferior opponents while anonymously stuffed in an airless, sweltering box. Gavin asserts that such a document did exist and that Kingkill is based on it. With this single shading of fact into fiction, the performance begins.

Special Effects. A literary stunt?

Yes, and well worth the price of admission. Beethoven and Napoleon materialize, as do Concord coaches, corduroy roads and a fully outfitted Mississippi River steamboat. With a few judicious details as props, Gavin creates palpable illusions of scenes 150 years old. Schlumberger and a companion stalk the New York waterfront at night: "Now and then they entered the nimbus of a gas lamp hovering just over their heads like a phosphorescing sea creature. Schlumberger heard the sinister hiss behind the glass. One pace beyond the lamp his shadow was squeezing from under his heel squat as a dwarf, and four strides later it was a lanky giant being sucked headfirst into the dark."

But Kingkill has more on its mind than special effects. The two main characters, Schlumberger and Maelzel, lock themselves in a struggle as tense and potentially humiliating as a championship chess match. Maelzel tempts the malformed Schlumberger into his machinery by using Louise Rouault, the wife of a mechanic-assistant, as bait. Eventually, Louise disappears but Schlumberger remains. The Turk frees him from the fear of losing a match publicly and gives him the power to expose Maelzel at any time. For his part, Maelzel exploits Schlumberger's gift for his own profit and dreams of a truly automated player. Mountebank that he is, Maelzel desperately wishes that the Turk could be a total machine, one that he could control completely.