The House of Rumour: A Novel

Written by Jake Arnott

Narrated by Michael Page

Mixing the invented and the real, The House of Rumour explores WWII spy intrigue (featuring Ian Fleming), occultism (Aleister Crowley), the West Coast science fiction set (Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Philip K. Dick all appear), and the new wave music scene of the ’80s. The decades-spanning, labyrinthine plot even weaves in The Jonestown Massacre and Rudolf Hess, UFO sightings and B-movies. Told through multiple narrators, what at first appears to be a constellation of random events begins to cohere as the work of a shadow organization—or is it just coincidence?

Tying the strands together is Larry Zagorski, an early pulp fiction writer turned US fighter pilot turned “American gnostic,” who looks back on his long and eventful life, searching for connections between the seemingly disparate parts. The teeming network of interlaced secrets he uncovers has personal relevance—as it mirrors a book of twenty-two interconnected stories he once wrote, inspired by the Major Arcana cards in the tarot.

Hailed as an heir to Don DeLillo’s Underworld by The Guardian, The House of Rumour is a tour de force that sweeps the reader through a century’s worth of secret histories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469283593

Jake Arnott

Jake Arnott is the author of The Long Firm, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. It was followed by He Kills Coppers, Truecrime, Johnny Come Home, and The Devil’s Paintbrush. Both The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers have been made into widely praised TV dramas in the UK. Arnott lives in London.

Reviews for The House of Rumour

[eapalmer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A rather audacious novel that skips around in time and place with an ease that is remarkable. My relative lack of knowledge about the occult and science fiction didn't stop me from enjoying Arnott's book. By the end, the multiple strands all made sense. Well worth reading.

[mayap_37 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book. It took me a while to love it, but once the connections start to engage, it snaps into sharp focus and the structure of the whole comes plain. It is a complicated novel and very difficult to review.A series of episodes, a set of lives loosely linked are woven together: the strange prophetic novel that seems to predict Rudolph Hess’s flight to Scotland, a young writer of pulp SF and his relationship to a cult that is connected to Aleister Crowley who is connected to a secret service agent who is connected to Rudolph Hess who is connected to a notorious transvestite who is connected to a confused singer turned actor who is making a film based on an old SF story that brings us back to the pulp writers. It all comes around in the end, full circle, connecting - not neatly or nicely, but very satisfyingly.I don’t know enough about the Tarot to know if the episodes follow its story of the Fool’s journey or if that’s a conceit; since Jake Arnott uses the Crowley Tarot rather than the classic deck and since Crowley appears as in the story and the theme of occultism runs through it, I assume it’s highly significant and I should probably read more about it. Quantum entanglement is another theme, and other theories of quantum physics, and it draws a lot of inspiration from Michael Coleman Talbot and the hologramatic universe theory.It took a while to ‘get’ it – who are these people, how can they possibly have anything In common? But as you keep reading the thing begins to develop a definite WOW factor. The artistry of it is stunning; it reminds me of those pictures that were so popular when I was a student, you peer endlessly into what seems to be a bank of impenetrable colour and then, suddenly, you see the image, everything snaps into sharp focus, everything becomes clear.It took about 5 days bedtime reading for this book to become something I couldn’t wait to pick up again each night. Stick with it, it takes time to develop but it’s definitely worth it. It’s not a book for everyone, it’s certainly not the page-turning thriller the cover blurb suggests, but if enjoy a challenging novel that requires you to think a little, or you have any interest at all in quantum physics, you’ll love it.

[remizak · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The House of Rumour is a kaleidoscopic tour through an alternate 20th-century universe, which Jake Arnott populates with a mix of real and fictional characters and events. The book's 22 chapters are told by various characters and, at first, the book seems to be made up of unrelated short stories. Glimmers of connections appear here and there, which kept me reading.I was also compelled to continue because, at every turn, it seemed I'd run into characters I'd recently read about elsewhere. It started with a description of Ian Fleming, then with Britain's naval intelligence, meeting up with a double agent code-named Tricycle. Of course I knew Fleming, but I also recognized Tricycle, having read about him as one of the many highly eccentric agents working against the Nazis in Ben Macintyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies.Much of the book deals with the fictional Larry Zagorski, a science-fiction writer who gets his start in the 1940s and becomes part of a southern California sci-fi writers' scene that includes Robert Heinlein, Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard and more. I'd only just read Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which covers (among other things, of course), Hubbard's experiences in that scene, so once again I felt like I was running into acquaintances. More acquaintances from my recent reading of Julia Scheeres's A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown popped up when Arnott spends a chapter in Jonestown on the fateful day of the mass suicide there in 1978.I admire the research that went into the historical events in this novel, and the talent it takes to meld real events and people with imagined ones. If only the glimmers of connections between the chapters had been more of a thread, I could have moved beyond admiration to enthusiasm.But, as I read, I just couldn't make meaningful connections between the elements of the plot freewheeling around the golden age of science fiction and those connected to British intelligence and Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland during World War II--and when you throw in Jonestown and Cuba, well, I was stumped. I went along for the ride, though, hanging on to get to that very last chapter when Arnott explains it all. Though those pages were lyrical and transcendent, they couldn't transform the reading experience of the prior 80%-plus of the book.I'm not sorry I read the book; much of it was fascinating. But a fractured plot and disjointed narrative that doesn't come together for most of the book made it hard to feel an emotional connection with the material.DISCLOSURE: I received a free review copy of this book.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A departure from Arnott's previous milieu of retro crime set in gangland London, this novel moves into global conspiracy theory territory. The action moves around from the burgeoning science fiction community in early 1940s California, where Larry Zagorski is struggling to make a living by publishing space adventure stories, through wartime London and Germany up to the current day where the obituary of a senior MI5 official making alluringly oblique references to a near scandal involving transvestite prostitutes. Well, that always works for me!The story takes the form of separate narratives from a range of different characters and chronicles the actions of a lurid cast, including many historic figures such as Ian Fleming, aspiring MI5 officer and subsequently creator of James Bond, near legendary thaumaturge Aleister Crowley, cult science fiction novelsit Robert Heinlein and L Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology and the concept of dianetics. However, most prominent among the real people featuring in the novel is Hitler's crony, Reichsmarshall Rudolph Hess, captured by the Allies after his bizarre solo flight to Scotland and subsequently imprisoned in Spandau until his suicide in 1987.Arnott has always been adept and conjuring engrossing plots, and here he weaves his conspiracy theory with subtlety and conviction. There are interesting sidebars, too - Larry Zagorski's ex-wife winds up in Jonestown where she succumbs to the mass suicide which left hundreds dead.Occaionally I felt that Arnott might be succumbing to his own ingenuity where the integrity of the plot wavered under the weight of its own complexity, but overall this was an engaging and engrossing read.

[randystafford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you are under 40, like conspiracy theories, and don't recognize two or more of the following names, you will probably want to read this book:Ian Fleming, spy and novelistAleister Crowley, the "wickedest man alive"Jack Parsons, rocket scientist and black magicianL. Ron Hubbard, novelist and messiahRudolph Hess, NaziJim Jones, messiahNation of Islam, saucer cultArnott, in a narrative arranged thematically around the Tarot deck, gives us a secret history that ranges through most of the 20th Century and up to 2011 and back and forth in time from the death of a former MI5 employee and a transvestite hooker in 1987 to a cabal of 1941 science fiction writers in Los Angeles. Here many a character real and imagined have parts, but mostly it's the story of the fictitious science fiction writer Larry Zagorski and the real Nazi Rudolph Hess. The supporting characters are more ideas and events than people: Hess' flight to England, the Cuban Revolution, Scientology, black magic, saucer cults, monster movies, utopia and the moment - like a collapsing quantum wave function - the promise becomes disillusionment. And, through it all, is the unrequited love of Larry for a woman.Part of me suspects that this sort of novel is written starting with a list of historical events and people and then a plot thought up for connecting all the characters and events. But that's ok. The whole aesthetic of a good conspiracy theory comes from how the dots are linked and how many you work with.However, Arnott's seemingly effortless erudition, by itself, doesn't impress me that much nor do I think it's bound to impress the average reader of the Fortean Times. It all seems a little glib and easy to those of us who once had to satisfy our cravings for outré occult and conspiracy esoterica by haunting used bookstores and mailing away for obscure catalogs rather than laying on the couch with a laptop.Readers who have read the secret histories and conspiracy novels of Tim Powers and Robert Anton Wilson, who each in their own way have covered some of the same territory in explorations of the tarot, quantum mechanics, and Aleister Crowley, are likely to find Arnott's philosophy light and his characters mostly dropped in names. That includes the raft of science fiction writers who get walk-on bits: Jack Williamson, L. Ron Hubbard, Robert Heinlein, Tony Boucher, and Leigh Brackett. The exception is one obscure, but interesting, writer who gets her own chapter: Katharine Burdekin aka Murray Constantine who wrote Swastika Night, the first "Hitler wins" alternate history. The other surprisingly rich character is Ian Fleming who ends up bemoaning that James Bond, the spy alter ego he thought he was running, now runs him. Philip K. Dick is promised on the cover but never makes an onstage appearance though there is more than a little of his legend in the drug addled Zagorski. But, with the exception of Fleming, Hess, and Zagorsk,i none of these characters have the depth of a typical Powers' character. The philosophical themes, somewhat unnecessarily wrapped up in the final, explanatory chapter, are not covered in the depth Wilson would have. (The author promises that thehouseofrumour.com has more about the various incidents, allegations, and conspiracies mentioned in the novel. I studiously avoided it since I wanted to review the book on its own merits.) The novel's publicity material itself makes the comparison between Arnott and Dan Brown and Dan DeLillo. I can't speak to that having no experience with either of those latter two authors.Still, even if he resorts to the usual literary tricks of juxtaposition and characters carefully created to elucidate thematic variations, Arnott's writing sometimes rises to a certain beauty - particularly in a chapter where two timelines are mingled: the moon landing of Apollo 11 and Hess' flight to England.So, the more easily wowed younger reader may just find this mindblowing. The older reader and fan of conspiracy theories probably won't, but both will get a quick, engaging tour through the secret byways of 20th century history. Like a tarot deck, a lot will depend on what the reader brings to the table.