The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, quoth The Usual Suspects’ Verbal Kint, was convincing the world he didn’t exist. But Gabriela Madrigal has seen him. Or seen one, anyway.
“A banal and common evil” – she thinks – “wrapping [himself] in the language of science and love”, Wilhelm von Tore (b 1919, Dresden) had a traumatic and unloving childhood, and then a hard time letting go, literally, of his adored grandmother.
Determined to believe that “first death is but an obstacle to the continuance of our lives”, he nonetheless says his farewells to Oma, experiencing a vision, not just of her, but also of a young, dark-haired, coquettish girl who, he somehow convinces himself, is “my promised bride”.
Armed with little more than his grandfather´s anatomy books, von Tore – “of Gates” – decides to dedicate himself to reopening that one between life and death, and embarks on a self-taught pseudo-medical career, propelled by weapons-grade Romanticism and the conviction that “medical death, as we currently call it, may not be what it seems”.
In 1933 he joins “a youth organisation” where he gets into the hunting and dissecting of animals, and then you-know-what comes along (he never names it, obviously), and people of his skills and mindset are needed for certain specialist experiments.
From here, von Tore’s progress is both predictable and somewhat short on detail. After the war, he ends up in America, on false papers, and gets a job as a lab assistant in a Key West hospital.
Here he meets Luciana, the bratty daughter of a diminished Cuban businessman (and younger sister of Gabriela). Thirty years his junior, “Luci” has grown up independent and curious and keenly interested in the physical and transactional opportunities of sex. She then has the misfortune to contract tuberculosis – in a medical environment the family cannot afford – at which point von Tore “discovers” she is “the woman that I had seen in my dreams”.
He promises the Madrigals he can save Luciana; but the cure turns out to be a cocktail of radiology, schnapps, tacky gifts and emotional blackmail. And yet, as Gabriela says, “when the rest of the world tells you that your loved one will die, the man holding out a bottle of snake oil looks like a priest with holy water”.
Von Tore starts treating Luci like a doll before she´s even dead, and in this phase – he claims – the ill-starred patient agrees to his marriage proposal. The relationship, I´m sorry to report, goes as far as you might imagine. And then further. (Readers who don’t want to hear an ageing Nazi talk of menstrual bleeding should consider this sufficient warning.)
First-time novelist Heather Parry does a decent job of juggling her insistent, dual narrators: the cruel and calculating (and plainly unreliable) von Tore – whose “memoirs and findings” we’re reading – and the increasingly desperate Gabriela, constrained by her own family’s all-too-human fears. Alas, for everybody, though, Gabriela is no match for von Tore’s tempting and deft (albeit transparent and insane) moral acrobatics.
Parry also deploys a battery of Gothic and/or (ir)religious literary allusions, gets in some neat jabs at the state of modern-day USA, and is good on the extent to which mankind hungers for comforting untruths, as well as the reekingly oppressive atmosphere of Florida.
Well-engineered authorial manoeuvres take us up several false summits, and there is a quite un-metaphorically stormy denouement; but the unexpected is left very late – and even then is not a satisfying knock-out blow.
The novel never achieves the profundity suggested by its title. The tug-of-war between antagonists becomes quite samey early on; flashes of satire are just that, not major threads (if Parry’s fiction is, as the press release claims, about “toxic masculinity… and the hyper-sexualisation of Latin American women”, then I have questions about the role of almost every woman in the novel); and we never really get to know – let alone strongly sympathise with – the decidedly “fallen” Luciana before she dies. Von Tore´s infatuation (howsoever irrational) is also dealt with cursorily.
Ultimately, I fear, you do sometimes have to review a book for what it’s not. In this case, the full story as it actually did happen.
Prospective readers may not wish to look up the true, staggeringly weird life of one Georg Carl Tänzler just yet (though everyone else should). But it’s flagged on Parry’s inside flap, and suffice to say it clarified my nagging sense that Orpheus… was not – if one may use the phrase – fully fleshed out, and harshly underlines the misstep of squeezing a quite extraordinary tale into a stock Mad Nazi Scientist straightjacket, a move which leaves this novel, like poor Luciana, less than the sum of their respective parts.
ASH Smyth is a journalist and radio presenter in the Falkland Islands
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