Heaven Can Wait Harry
BOTTUM, J.
Heaven Can Wait By J. Bottum Iknow that we are living in the endtime and must be grateful for little triumphs in our literature. I know that the race of giants who wrote their books before...
...All He needs His angels to do is produce in three generations a human being capable of stealing the Tablets from their hiding place underneath the altar in the papal chapel of St...
...Quist is an untidy, unbathed giant with little interest in sex and a desperate desire to avoid his political heritage...
...Delius is a quick and fastidious little man whose chief hobby is seduction...
...Swimming in the warm Caribbean sea after her performance (while her husband beds the widow of a Cuban revolutionary hero), Ada joins Delius in the adulterous coupling that conceives the angels' great desire...
...One of the most entertaining and profound philosophical novels ever written," the Washington Post chimed in...
...His claim that genetic research threatens fundamental changes to human life will surprise only those who never read the newspapers...
...I know that the race of giants who wrote their books before the Flood has been washed away and that we must give praise now to lesser things...
...The beautiful young Quinten finds his father Onno Quist in Rome and they collaborate on the divine burglary...
...But Mulisch's thesis seems to be that the study of history and the study of physics— or, more precisely, Archaeology and Astronomy, Quist and Delius—are the two forces shaping modern times...
...But in The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch decides instead to run in the other direction by making his narrator inhuman—an angel reporting to his superior in the celestial hierarchy...
...If this sounds like fun, that's because it is...
...But the angels have a problem: God wants quick action...
...Sometimes they're merely interesting, as that 99 percent of Hitler's power came from his strange physical presence rather than his doctrines...
...In its final 150 pages, The Discovery of Heaven shifts abruptly into a postmodern, half-serious parody of a crime thriller that owes a great deal to Umberto Eco's medieval detective story The Name of the Rose...
...The child-to-be is Quinten Quist, the blessed messenger, the chosen one, who will obtain for the angels the Sacred Tablets God needs to break His ties to humankind...
...There in the country, over the next fifteen years, the angelically beautiful, golden-haired Quinten learns from his eccentric neighbors the skills he will need to burglarize the Vatican: lock-picking, architecture, art history, and sleuthing...
...That the pact was signed on our behalf by Francis Bacon shouldn't come as much surprise...
...Once the trio gets back to Holland, the angels intervene again, dropping a tree on Ada and putting her into a coma...
...Like Homer, Dante, and Milton," the Wall Street Journal proclaimed (later adding, for good measure, Dostoyevsky, Umberto Eco, Sir Walter Scott, and H. Rider Haggard...
...The symbolism becomes a little heavy-handed when Art itself, in the person of a virginal cellist named Ada, is caught up in a romantic triangle with the two men...
...On a rainy night in the mid-1960s, a pair of peculiar Dutch-men—both conceived on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933—meet and form one of those intense male friendships that confront the people who lack them with "a deficiency in themselves...
...Since Quist is a hopeless parent, the baby Quinten is taken off to live in a country commune with Ada's mother and Max Delius...
...As Lucifer hoped, science quickly dissolved faith in God and His angels, and in disgust God has decided to annul His own covenant by shattering the Tablets of the Law He dictated to Moses...
...The first two-thirds of the book owes a considerable debt to Eco's later novel, Foucault's Pendulum...
...The Discovery of Heaven has its flaws, of course, but those flaws appear mostly when we take the book too seriously...
...And yet, there may be something useful in comparing Mulisch with Mann, together with Musil, Joyce, Proust, and everyone else we think of as the chief modernist authors, if only as a measure of what we lack in books nowadays: a humor that isn't entirely flattened into irony, an intelligence that isn't entirely a parade of knowledge, a symbolism that believes at last in the intelligibility of both history and the self, and a narration that loves the humanity of its characters...
...The description of all this supernatural super-plotting takes Mu-lisch about 30 pages of interspersed angelic dialogue...
...Judged as a work of popular fiction, Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven is a fine book, funny, intelligent, and well written...
...The angels don't like to drop trees on people, of course, much less fling meteorites around in densely populated Holland or cause the entire First World War just to bring an Austrian husband together with his Dutch wife...
...Perhaps he believes that to develop his characters would be to weaken their symbolic value (though Thomas Mann did not find it so...
...Sometimes the conversational claims of the characters are convincing, as, for example, that the Dutch differ from other Europeans primarily because they kept out of the First World War but were in the Second...
...Mulisch's central claim that Machiavelli and Francis Bacon are the hinges on which the door to modernity opened will come as a revelation only to those who never read intellectual history...
...The infant is rescued by a Caesarean delivery...
...A highborn Dutchman named Onno Quist is an amateur linguist who has just deciphered secrets written in Etruscan...
...And that ought to be praise enough—except that nobody ever said such modest things about Musil's The Man Without Qualities or Mann's The Magic Mountain...
...The remaining 700 pages of The Discovery of Heaven tells the story of the poor people chosen to bring about the angels' cosmic scheme...
...seen from the aspect of the family of the woman crushed inside the car, the world has been turned upside down...
...Seduced first by Delius, but married eventually to Quist, Ada, and her cello-playing, are responsible for the fateful invitation that brings the three dilettante radicals to a 1960s conference in Cuba on the future of Communist revolution...
...Compared with a novel like The Magic Mountain, The Discovery of Heaven is bound to suffer, and suffer unfairly, for Mulisch has written something that is not brilliant, but merely smart—or, better, merely savvy about the state of our general knowledge...
...An interesting if somewhat predictable double-view develops: Seen from the aspect of eternity, little things like causing a tree to fall on a car are minor angelic interventions in human affairs...
...Judged as part of the project of Western literature, it gets us no forwarder...
...There's a great deal of talk in Mulisch's book, as there must be in any philosophical novel...
...For several centuries, God has allowed humans to go their own way—and in the 16th century Lucifer seized his chance, entering into "a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him" in return for the divine powers of science...
...His newfound friend, an astronomer trying to decipher secrets written in the light from distant stars, is Max Delius, the son of a Jewish mother who is denounced to the Nazis by his Aryan father...
...But the fact that The Discovery of Heaven is a fat, 730-page philosophical novel of a kind we don't get much anymore should be beside the point...
...Mulisch oddly refuses to develop his new novel's characters much beyond their initial set of eccentric characteristics, and The Discovery of Heaven remains a somewhat cold and distant book...
...Together the ill-matched pair of friends wanders the streets of Amsterdam, trying to top each other with ever grander, louder, and more outrageous explanations of European history, human psychology, and the origins of the universe...
...But when America's book reviewers acclaim a novel like Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven as a major addition to Western literature, we have begun to settle for something lesser than we really need to...
...In the sweeping speculative tradition of a Robert Musil or a Thomas Mann," declared Newsday...
...His claim that "the general downfall of everything" in modern times derives from the loss of God will surprise only those who never read anything...
...Harry Mulisch has written what is actually an enjoyable and quick-reading book, a little overlong and a little ponderous in Paul Vincent's translation from the Dutch, perhaps, but a fine reading project for the holidays...
...Then they flee to Israel, where all Mulisch needs to finish off his story is an Islamic tour guide, a flying horse named Deep Thought Sunstar, a talking raven named Edgar, a miraculous ascension into heaven, and the fortuitous intervention of the Jerusalem city garbage department...
...And sometimes they're perverse, as that Mikhail Gorbachev is to goodness in the 20th century what Hitler is to evil...
...The gap between all-knowing, godlike narrators and their unknowing, human characters has bothered thoughtful novelists for more than a hundred years, and the solution of using what literary types call "fallible narration" has been fully explored, from Henry James's The Ambassadors (told by a deceived narrator) to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (told by a deceptive narrator...
...But mostly they're just lightweight...
...John Lateran in the Vatican...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 15
