Salon

With the publication of his debut novel, "Solitude-12" (Odinochestvo-12), Arsen Revazov has been hailed by critics as a Russian Dan Brown; some have even cautiously mentioned Umberto Eco, the founder of the modern "intellectual thriller." Indeed, the beginning of this "fusion novel," as the author calls it, has all the signs of a bestseller in the making. Three old friends, all Moscow yuppies in their thirties, meet by the corpse of their fourth mate, who has just been mysteriously killed and decapitated. The next day, a nondescript customer offers Iosif -- one of the trio and the novel's narrator -- a hefty sum for the placement of several odd-sounding words and a nine-digit number in the mass media.

To date, Revazov has been best known for his work in Internet advertising. One strongly suspects that as an expert in PR, just like his hero, he wrote his novel so that every online review would have to include those keywords. Well, I won't reveal them.

Iosif and company soon learn that they have become entangled in a web woven by the Hats, who have nothing to do with headgear; the name derives from the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut. The Hats are a millennia-old secret society bent on -- surprise, surprise -- world domination. As secret societies go, this one is extremely sloppy and disorganized. The good guys invariably escape their traps with remarkable ease.

To put it bluntly, the plot sucks. Iosif's globetrotting seems unmotivated; revelations come either too soon or too late and don't impress. The best scenes are those drawn from reality, such as one where real-life Internet guru Anton Nossik explains the secrets of web search using nothing but curse words. Outside of Moscow, Revazov loses his otherwise keen sketching abilities; settings such as Jerusalem, Rome or Japan seem false, seen from a detached tourist's perspective at best.

The novel's "fusion" approach, however, helps one digest its implausible plot. Whenever one of the characters alludes to a joke, Revazov quotes it in full in the footnotes. The novel is rich in digressions on subjects ranging from history to science. It even includes a short play, allegedly adapted by Iosif from an authentic medieval manuscript. Don't ask how a patchily educated yuppie who could not previously decipher "Ave Maria" understood the convoluted Latin verbiage of a 13th-century monk -- credibility is not the novel's strong point.

"Solitude-12" has its own web site, www.o12.ru, and it was released as a "book for mobile phones" before it actually hit the bookstores. Whatever its artistic merits, Revazov's literary debut is surely a successful PR campaign.