Tangled Web UK Review September 2000
The Snake in Sydney by
Michael Larsen
pbk out February 00
(Sceptre)
at £10
Michael Larsen’s debut novel in English (his second in his native land of Denmark) was titled Uncertainty and was a fast-moving thriller, the uncertainty promised by the title resulting from the idea that in the new digital age no image we see can be guaranteed to have some basis in reality. His ambitious and apocalyptic new book, like Uncertainty a best-seller back in Denmark, extends that principle to embrace a good deal of scientific thought.
I don’t know what to believe any more confesses his heroine Annika Niebuhr, in the concluding pages of this novel. The cool, rational Annika is a Danish doctor working in Sydney, Australia, an expert in snakes and a distant less sympathetic relative to Smilla Jaspersen. The reader, reeling not only from the labyrinthine plot, may well sympathise. About the only certainties in this book are that Australia is home to seven of the world’s ten most dangerous snakes, that in high season few gardens in Sydney are complete without its snake (does the Australian Tourist Board know about this?) and that the venom of the taipan, Australia’s (and the world’s) most poisonous snake, is 850 times stronger than that of the American rattlesnake.
Even that latter fact is not certain because an apparently dead young woman, bitten by a taipan concealed in her car, and under examination by Annika in the novel’s opening scene, suddenly sits up, pulls out a gun and bolts from the room. Nor, as Annika knows, is the taipan native to Sydney. The girl reappears later in Annika’s car as she leaves for home, and warns her against anything or anyone to do with Atlas X.
The ultimately implausible plot is the least satisfactory element of the book, smoothly written, translated and readable though it is. Many of it’s ingredients, though given an extra fascination by the background and training of its key protagonist, are just a little too familiar: an apparent suicide, a sympathetic policeman, mysterious photographs, an attempt on Annika’s life, hints of dark secrets at the heart of government.
What makes the book remarkable is the means by which Larsen builds tension. For the expository passages between each plot development, normally descriptive or mood-building, here constitute, more often than not, a debate about the nature of knowledge.
Lack of knowledge is for the lazy comments Annika at one point. At first we learn about snakes, and how to deal with them, then about the snake and its role in mythology and early religion. Later the argument and there is one) embraces many different kinds of knowledge,
scientific, medical and philosophical. That, for instance that, even now, most knowledge is inexact, often based on flaws in the knowledge that came before–and that some knowledge (for the plot is never far away) is deadly. Throughout our respect for Annika grows.
Does it work? Yes, it does. Mindstretching and absorbing, revelling in complexity, this is not an effortless read. But it’s a rewarding one.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
