Book review: Apart from the clue in the subtitle, the first half of the book offers few suggestions that this is a horror story. Another hint is lurking at the bottom of the cast of characters where the two-page list ends with “Nameless inhabitants of the walls, floors and ceilings”. Less obvious at this stage is the lack of female characters, a handful of whom come after the word “and”.
Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish author in a class of her own, worthy recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature. Her novels are quirky, wide-ranging fables peppered with fascinating characters, historical observations and, best of all, humour. Her fragmentary novel Flights, which won the Man Booker International Prize, contained a few choice observations about Captain Cook. “New Zealand,” she wrote, “was, it seems, the last land we invented.”
Tokarczuk’s latest novel is set at a health resort in the Silesian mountains in 1913. At the time, Silesia was in Germany, but became part of Poland at the end of World War II. The locations in the book are real and there are a handful of contemporary photographs of the small town.
The European love of the health spa is very much to the fore. We should not forget that Katherine Mansfield parodied this Germanic obsession in her early collection of stories, In a German Pension, which included a chapter called “Germans at Meat”. But the inspiration behind the book is Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain.
Both central characters are young engineers, sent to a health spa for their recovery, and both are surrounded by a supporting cast obsessed by ideologies such as humanism and radicalism. The Empusium’s cast of characters includes these, together with a socialist, a theosophist and an early psychoanalyst.
Our young engineer and central character is called Mieczyslaw Wojnicz. Thankfully, he introduces himself to one of his fellow guests with a guide to the pronunciation of his name “Mi-etchy-swuff Voy-nitch”. They reside in the Guesthouse for Gentlemen but constantly play a game in which they imagine moving to much superior accommodation called the Kurhaus. Here, everything is close by, the rooms are more comfortable, the cooking better and even the patients look taller and cleaner.
The one benefit of their present accommodation is a seemingly endless supply of “Schwärmerei”, recommended by the doctor as good for the lungs and described as follows: “The liqueur tasted truly exotic – it was sweet and bitter all at once, and also sharp … with a hint of moss, the forest, suggestive of logs in a cellar and slightly mouldy apples. And something very strange too, which Wojnicz could not put into words, though he thought he had the way to describe it on the tip of his tongue.”
The arrival of the promised horror is pedestrian; around halfway, someone notices that all the headstones in the local cemetery show deaths in November. One of the guests is convinced that the landscape is capable of killing a person and the first full moon of November is the danger point – a date that’s fast approaching.
The residents of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen seem more concerned with denigrating the weaknesses of women, their lack of mental capacity or the way they infect their children with excessive sentimentality. These conversational remarks obsess the all-male cast.
Are they just a sign of the times, or is there something deeper going on? On that question, Tokarczuk has a surprise waiting for us in the author’s note at the end.
This is a novel that seems to inch forwards at snail’s pace, but the final pages are a breathless whirlwind of revelations and action. There is far more going on than initially meets the eye.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, by Olga Tokarczuk (Text, $40), is out now.
