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 But where Brown’s prose is functional and his historical content often shaky, Neville writes with genuine flair and her research — she worked for Bank of America and lived in Algeria and other international postings — gives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.

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