THE ANGEL MAKER

You don’t have to be from the American Deep South to write a Southern Gothic, R. J. Ellory has recently proved that. Now Stefan Brijs, one of our European cousins, proves that the Deep South has a sort of antipodes on the triangular Dutch-Belgian-German border and that the horrors that once lurked in the swamps and bayous might be found just as easily in the quiet villages on the purlieus of Aachen. They might be found there because they return there. They return in the form of Doctor Victor Hoppe and his three children; he is the same Doctor Hoppe, son of Karl Hoppe who had been the village doctor before him, who was once thought an imbecile and was placed in a Sanatorium, who became for a time the world’s most famous embryologist and then very quickly its most infamous. 

The villagers wonder about the three children and why they are so rarely seen. Stefan Brijs, using cross-cutting, flash-forward and flash-backward tells us what the villagers scarcely learn: what has happened to Victor Hoppe, what he now does, and perhaps, far worse, why he does it. That, to put it mildly, is because he is not normal, and although a lot of scientific terminology slips into this novel, the one phrase that is not used is the one that will probably occur early on to most readers: Victor has some sort of Autism. It allows him almost complete concentration on his studies; it destroys the social benefits of his work and ultimately everyone associated with him or them.

Wolfheim, Victor’s home village is in a strongly conservative Catholic area: it is the church in the form of the village priest who encourages his father to have him sent to the Sanatorium, but it is nuns who care for Victor there and give him the Bible he learns to read from and prove he is really a prodigy. It is on Church processions that Victor meets the crucified Christ, and it is through them that he comes to identify the relationship of God The Father and God The Son on one side, and Karl The Father and Victor The Son on the other. Modern medical ethics, if not the original Hippocratic Oath, discourages all crucifixion and provokes strong feelings of conflict within Victor. Only when Victor matriculates to university in Bonn and Aachen does he escape the confines of religion. It is when his medical studies collapse disastrously and he is forced to return to Wolfheim, and the family home he has inherited after his father’s suicide, that everything begins to move to its catastrophe. Medical experiments and apocalypotic religion make a near-explosive brew. A couple of things make all this brew stronger, apart from Brijs’s fragmentary story-telling: one is the imagery of the external world (the demolition of a viewing tower on the tri-state boundary, and the erection of a new, bigger tower with staircases spiralling in DNA-fashion upward while requiring deep foundations, for instance), and the other is in Victor Hoppe’s character: while he cannot understand falsity in others, he will not speak the truth. The third and final part of ANGEL MAKER proves the strength of that, almost literally coming back to haunt him in the shape of the missing “wife” and mother. Two hundred years ago another Victor had problems with his “child” too, perhaps that name is not just coincidence.

I had doubts about THE ANGEL MAKER until a good half-way through. It redeemed itself. Gothic has come back to its Low Country roots.