Tangled Web UK Review August 2008
The Angel Maker by
Stefan Brijs
hbk out July 08
Published by Weidenfeld
at £12.99
Brijs was born in Flanders, one of those regions where national borders seem to have no sense. It is in Belgium, but is Dutch speaking. The heart of this story is that it is set in the part of Belgium that is nestled between The Netherlands and Germany.
The village of Wolfheim is agog when Dr Victor Hoppe comes home after twenty years in Bonn as a distinguished scientist. More curiously, he has brought home identical triplet sons, whom he says have no mother. It is almost a year before the villagers get a good look at the children, to discover that all have the identical repair to a harelip that has disfigured Victor’s face. Reluctantly, Hoppe takes on Charlotte Maenhout to look after and teach the children, and it is soon apparent to all that they are gravely ill. Victor shows an odd detachment concerning the children, even going to the extent of tattooing them to tell them apart. Charlotte attempts to render the children’s life normal, but it results in near-tragedy. It is only when we learn of Victor’s own childhood, and his scientific pursuits that the true tragedy of the children’s situation is unravelled.
The book is cleverly divided into three parts by Brijs, so that though we have some suspicions as to the origins of the children, we have, in Part One only the facts as the villagers see them. In Part Two, we learn of Victor’s own horrific upbringing, when due to his harelip he was rejected by his parents and deemed an idiot. In fact he was autistic, and with a brilliant if single-track mind. In his bringing up in a religious institution lay the seeds of the tragedy of his adult life. His inability to relate to people and society results in a desire to "better God", and he embarks on the study of cloning. As his results are chaotic, and never verified, he is cast out of the scientific community as a fraud. This is what drives him back to Wolfheim. The third part of the book charts his final efforts to perfect cloning.
Brijs brilliantly uses the structure of the book to set the scene. And it is a very normal, if rather backward-looking and religious setting. Building on that, he opens up Victor’s own life so that we truly feel for this remote and unconnected individual. Hoppe cannot see any gradations of grey between good and evil, and in that lies his fate. The fact that we feel a great deal of sympathy for this perpetrator of scientific horror makes the theme of the book all the more terrifying. The film rights have been sold. It will be a fascinating film to watch, if it comes off as well as the novel.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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