The Eight

Chess as the Game of Power

Katherine Neville’s The Eight arrives with an extraordinary premise: the Montglane Service, a jewel-encrusted chess set created for Charlemagne, has been dispersed across history because the secret encoded in its pieces — a formula for limitless power — is too dangerous for any one person to hold. In 1790, as the French Revolution tears Paris apart, the abbess of Montglane disperses the pieces among her nuns, setting in motion a centuries-long game. In 1972, computer analyst Catherine Velis finds herself drawn into the endgame of that same contest, pursued across three continents by players who have been waiting for decades.

Published in 1988, the novel essentially invented the formula that Dan Brown would make famous fifteen years later. But where Brown’s prose is functional and his historical content often shaky, Neville writes with genuine flair and her research — she worked for Bank of America and lived in Algeria and other international postings — gives the global settings a lived-in authenticity that thrillers of this kind rarely achieve.

Two Timelines, One Board

The novel’s great structural achievement is the interweaving of its two timelines. Mireille, a young novice at Montglane, and Catherine Velis, a systems analyst in the 1970s oil boom, are linked across two centuries by the chess pieces and by the mysterious “Game” that has been played continuously since the set was first hidden. Neville cuts between them with considerable skill, ensuring that each timeline illuminates the other — revelations in the past reframe what we understand about the present, and vice versa.

The chess framework is more than decorative. Neville draws on real mathematical history — particularly the work of Euler and the legendary “Knight’s Tour” problem — to suggest that the Montglane Service encodes a formula of genuine mathematical significance. The novel does not require its readers to understand the mathematics to enjoy the thriller, but the intellectual architecture gives the plot a coherence that purely Da Vinci-style MacGuffin hunts often lack. The pieces aren’t just treasure; they are a language, and the Game is an argument.

Adventure on a Global Scale

One of The Eight’s genuine pleasures is its geography. Catherine’s modern timeline takes her from New York to Algeria to revolutionary Russia and beyond, and Neville renders each setting with the confident specificity of someone who has been there. The Algeria sections in particular — set during the 1970s oil crisis — have a political texture that most adventure novels abandon in favor of plot momentum. The French Revolution sequences, meanwhile, bring Robespierre, Talleyrand, and Catherine the Great into the frame as players in the Game, lending historical weight to what could easily have felt like pulp fantasy.

The novel’s weaknesses are mostly those of ambition: with so many characters spread across two centuries and multiple continents, some threads feel underresolved, and the climactic revelations require a degree of acceptance that fully committed readers will grant easily while more skeptical ones may find rushed. But for readers willing to give themselves to the Game, The Eight is one of the great unsung thrillers of the twentieth century.

The Author and the Book’s Afterlife

Katherine Neville came to fiction by an unusual route. She had worked in computing and international banking, with postings in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, before sitting down to write The Eight, and that résumé is everywhere in the novel’s confident handling of technology, finance, and far-flung geography. Published in 1988, the book became a word-of-mouth success and a long-running international bestseller, frequently described as a cult classic by the readers who discovered it. Its real vindication came fifteen years later, when Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code turned the historical-conspiracy thriller — secret societies, encoded artifacts, a relic that rewrites history, a chase across famous European settings — into one of the dominant commercial forms of the new century. Neville had built that template a decade and a half earlier, and with a degree of intellectual ambition and stylistic flair that many of its later imitators lacked. She returned to the world of the Montglane Service two decades on in a sequel, The Fire (2008), bringing the chess game forward into a new generation.

Strong Women and the Pleasures of Excess

One of the novel’s quietly notable features, especially for a thriller of its era, is that both of its protagonists are women — Mireille, the novice swept into the chaos of revolutionary France, and Catherine Velis, the sharp, sardonic computer expert of the 1970s — and both drive their own stories rather than serving as ornaments to a male hero. Neville surrounds them with a gleeful abundance of historical guest stars, from Talleyrand and Robespierre to Catherine the Great and, in the modern timeline, figures drawn from the world of international oil and finance, and she is unembarrassed by the sheer maximalism of her design. The chess conceit, underpinned by genuine mathematical lore such as the Knight’s Tour, supplies an intellectual scaffolding that keeps the globe-trotting from feeling arbitrary. The result demands a generous reader — one willing to accept long coincidences and a plot that prizes momentum over plausibility — but rewards that generosity with one of the most inventive and propulsive adventure novels of its decade.

Who Should Read It

The Eight is ideal for readers who loved the puzzle-and-chase architecture of The Da Vinci Code but want a richer, more literate predecessor, and for anyone drawn to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or to dual-timeline historical fiction that braids past and present around a single object. Chess players will find an added layer of pleasure in the game’s symbolic deployment, though no knowledge of the game is required to follow the story. Newcomers should be prepared for a slightly disorienting opening, as the novel introduces a large cast across two centuries before its design becomes clear; patience through the early chapters is repaid as the two timelines lock into place. Approached in the right spirit — as an intelligent, sprawling entertainment rather than a realist novel — it remains a hugely enjoyable and unjustly under-celebrated thriller.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A brilliantly constructed historical thriller that plays chess with history and wins more often than not.