“The Burnable Book” takes place in 1385, when the walled city of London is still finding its footing after the Peasants’ Revolt four years earlier. But perhaps all those years trying to engage sleepy college students with the details of Ye Olde England have taught Holsinger what the Summoner figured out 600 years ago: Don’t underestimate the value of a good fart joke. After a decade of writing monographs such as “Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary History,” Holsinger seems the last author we’d turn to for exciting skulduggery. You do not want to challenge the good doctor to a “Canterbury Tales” trivia contest. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, he teaches medieval literature at the University of Virginia. Holsinger, a native of Fairfax, Va., takes on the novelist’s mantle draped in academic robes.
The cerebral heroes of these novels let us imagine that we might someday save the realm not by flying a helicopter through the English Chunnel, but merely by explicating a particularly knotty metaphor. We reach - carefully, so as not to wake the cat - for a lush bibliomaniac thriller. “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” of a different sort. After all, there comes a time in the life of every poorly dressed bookworm - the Post-Walter-Mitty Phase - when it’s tiring for us even to fantasize about commanding a Navy hydroplane or saving lives in the ER. The popularity of this subgenre - “An Instance of the Fingerpost,” “The Shadow of the Wind,” “Ex Libris” and many elegant others - isn’t surprising. “The Burnable Book” joins a heavy shelf of novels about intrepid literary folk. Thrill to his daring Middle English rimes! Gasp at his mighty scansion! Here in the pages of Bruce Holsinger’s medieval adventure, that randy old poet finally gets the “Mission Impossible” cameo he deserves.
Forget Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa tower the hot new super-agent is 14th-century writer Geoffrey Chaucer.
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