After a few recent discussions about fantasy in other languages than English, I figured it was time to go check out some of those authors, so I figured I'd start with Bernard Werber, one of the bigger French sci-fi/speculative fiction authors. I wanted to go with a series, but as the first books of the respective series were checked out in the library, I went for this book instead, a stand-alone story with a perhaps somewhat sensationalistic title. In hindsight, perhaps not the best choice.

L'Ultime Secret opens with a chess game between the human world champion, a man named Samuel Fincher, and the chess computer Deep Blue IV. The game is the world championship game - or at least, an attempt by the human world champion to reclaim that title from the computer which had defeated his predecessor. Fincher - a neuropsychiatrist by trade, who has only recently discovered a passion for chess and then started a meteoric rise through the ranks of the grandmasters - goes on to win the game, then dies that same night in the throes of passion with his supermodel girlfriend.

If that sounds like an absurd opening to a book, it's because it is. The rest of the novel revolves around two journalists trying to figure out how Fincher died - and in the process, figuring out a lot of other things, including "The Ultimate Secret" of the title, which is the reason for Fincher's unlikely (or, if one is less charitable, ridiculously contrived) chess prowess. In this, the human brain and its mysteries play a key role. Unfortunately, for a book that's supposed to deal with the unsuspected capabilities of the human brain, the plot is disappointingly weak and contrived. During the two journalists' investigation, they compile a list of the primary desires and motivations of humans - security, shelter, sustenance, sexual desires, social needs, and so on - as they encounter them. Subtlety is rather far off, though, and the way in which they seem to solve every problem and convince every person they encounter with minuscule bribes and the female journalist's cleavage isn't exactly plausible. And of course there has to be a romantic subplot, but here too there is little to be enthusiastic about. One of the few good ideas in the novel is the way Werber occasionally describes an occurrence in the human body or brain - a sudden flash of inspiration, for instance, or the transmission of a sound to the inner ear and its conversion to understandable speech - in neurological and biological detail. It gets old after a few times, but it's more interesting than the plot and the idea in itself is good.

In conclusion, L'Ultime Secret can perhaps best be summed up as a not particularly successful attempt to write a "Da Vinci Code" about the mysteries of the human brain, as it isn't nearly as good a page-turner and doesn't even offer much that is new or interesting about the brain. Character development is on an about comparable level, but the book suffers to an even worse extent (yes, that is possible, evidently) from being contrived and unlikely. Every few chapters, I was hit again by something particularly unsubtle or simplistic. Examples range from the female protagonist's magic cleavage and extremely unsubtle manipulation techniques, to supposedly brilliant ideas like a company located in a psychiatry ward that produces security cameras and systems with unpaid paranoiacs as employees - because paranoiacs are paranoid, so the security systems they make must be the best in the world!

I imagine that Mr. Werber has in fact written better books, and that it would be unfair to write him off after this, but all the same, his better-known and presumably better books have lost a fair few places on my priority list.