The Atlantis Code

Novel. It is a thriller. It is the first book about a character named Thomas Lourds.

I have not read the book. This is not a chapter-by-chapter reading. The outline below comes from the publisher’s description and from a short Booklist note on the same listing.

What the book is

The title is The Atlantis Code.

Charles Brokaw is the author. The publisher’s note calls him a scholar and an academic. I have no further public biography in the sources I used.

Forge Books published the hardcover. Amazon lists the date as 10 November 2009, the length as 432 pages, and the ISBN-13 as 9780765315311. The same listing calls it book 1 of 4 in the Thomas Lourds series.

The Atlantis idea

In this novel Atlantis is a lost place that someone has just found. The publisher says satellites have spotted very ancient ruins along the Spanish coast. Thomas Lourds, a linguist and an archaeologist, decides those ruins are Atlantis.

The publisher says the ruins belong to a civilization that was far ahead in technology. It says they hold secrets about the origin of man. It says the person who controls Atlantis will control the world.

That is a story stake. It is not a report of a real find off Spain. I have seen no archaeological paper, in the sources for this page, that matches the satellites in the blurb.

The Atlantis here is also not argued as Antarctica, or as a fairy city, or as Plato’s island in a close reading. The public description puts the ruins on the coast of Spain and then sends the chase across other countries.

The plot as the publisher describes it

I am not opening the chapters. This is the frame the publisher gives.

Lourds teaches linguistics at Harvard. He likes risk. While he is shooting a film about his own life and his scientific work, the news of the ruins arrives. He believes the lost continent has been found. A race begins. His rivals will do anything to arrive first.

One rival is an ultrasecret branch of the Catholic Church. The publisher sets Lourds and that branch against each other. Both want the secrets of Atlantis.

Booklist, quoted on the Amazon listing, says the chapters are short and gripping. It says the action moves from Egypt to Russia to Africa to London. It compares the book to Indiana Jones and to The Da Vinci Code. I have not checked those likenesses myself. I only note how a review journal sold the book.

I am not describing objects, inscriptions, or late twists. Those details are inside the novel. I do not have them from a source I am willing to treat as a summary rather than as the text.

My view

I file this as fiction that borrows the Atlantis name for a race-and-conspiracy plot. The Catholic secret group, the satellites, and the world-controlling ruin are thriller parts. They do not become evidence because a novel states them.

The phrase “origin of man” in the blurb is the point where a researcher might lean forward. A real find that rewrote human origins would be news in journals, not only in a novel’s jacket. Nothing in the public description points me to such a paper. I treat the phrase as the prize the characters are chasing.

Spain as a landing place is a choice of setting. Plato’s account puts Atlantis in the Atlantic, outside the Pillars of Heracles, which is at least the same ocean as a Spanish coast. The novel, as described, does not stop to test Plato. It starts the chase.

I have not read it. I cannot say whether the linguistics is careful or only costume. From the outside it looks like a code book. The title says “code.” The hero is a language professor. That is the promise. The delivery is still inside the pages.

Sources

I used these public sources. I did not use the text of the book.

• Amazon listing for ISBN 9780765315311. Publisher description, edition details, the note on the author, and the Booklist lines printed there.