Science runneth amok in Belgian ‘page turner’

If you’re mesmerized by the complexities of the Whittier, Calif., octuplets saga, then “The Angel Maker” might be the novel for you.

Stefan Brijs, 39, a former schoolteacher, is Belgian literature’s rising star. “The Angel Maker,” his fourth novel, was a best-seller there and sold an astonishing 80,000 copies in neighboring Holland. (The Dutch language and the Flemish in which Brijs writes are essentially the same tongue.)

This book, which flavors the author’s previous forays into magic realism with a dose of the Gothic, explores a world of science gone amok in a society whose religion —- in this case, the conservative traditional Catholicism of small-town Flanders —- offers no consolation.

Victor Hoppe returns after decades to his home village of Wolfheim and brings with him triplet sons, whom he is at pains to shield from local scrutiny. They are named after archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, an intimation of their father’s godlike role in their conception. They also are far from normal, possessed of huge heads and the faces of old men.

As Victor becomes village physician, a role his father once occupied, we learn in flashback that he had not been away practicing medicine but was working at a German university, where he conducted unauthorized human cloning experiments of which his “sons” are a product.

Along the way, Brijs skillfully sets out Victor’s tragic history. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. He lacks empathy, is socially awkward because he cannot read others’ nonverbal communication, is obsessively attentive and has a tone-deaf pedantry when dealing with others. The Viennese pediatrician who first identified the condition called his patients “little professors.”

As a child, Victor was sent by his unfeeling father first to a home for the “feeble-minded” run by nuns and, later, to a Christian Brothers boarding school. From that experience, he has internalized a photographic recollection of Scripture and liturgical practices —- particularly those surrounding the Passion —- and a belief that God the creator is cruel and unfeeling.

Without spoiling the conclusion, suffice to say that unorthodox science and unorthodox faith conjoin to echo the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Enthusiastic Belgian critics call “The Angel Maker” a “page turner,” and it remains so in English.

One of the narrative’s most thought-provoking conceits is that Victor hates God the Father, whom he equates with judgment and retribution, but loves Jesus, whom he identifies with compassion and goodness.

It’s easy enough to see how Victor conflates God with his removed father, and identifies with the suffering son.

“The Angel Maker” is an alternately fascinating and repellent novel. The latter characteristic is a consequence of the fact that the major protagonists are unsympathetic.

The triplets’ nanny is a reasonably humane character, as is the Christian Brother who encourages young Victor in his intellectual talents. Beyond that, it’s hard to find somebody to root for here. That’s why the author’s decision to impose Asperger’s syndrome on his protagonist is a perplexing one. Somebody born with an empathy deficit and a tendency toward obsessive activity can hardly be held culpable for the monstrously heedless science Victor Hoppe pursues —- to his own destruction and the torment of so many.

Yet real-world dilemmas confronted by science involve good men and women in command of their senses and choices. Ambition and acclaim are seductions, certainly, but the harder issues are the old ones of means and ends.

Brijs seems to propose an alternate point of view —- a notion that scientific progress is a blind force navigating the world and society without reference to any moral compass. Making Victor the embodiment of that with his Asperger’s not only deprives him of the complexities of ordinary human choice but also renders him a merely symbolic character and stacks the deck in the argument over whether biological science should do anything it theoretically can do.

Similarly, by emptying the religious current that runs through this novel of anything but traditional folk piety, Brijs seems to leave no place for the Western creeds’ long history of moral reasoning. Brijs posits a world in which no such reconciliation is desired, let alone possible.

“The Angel Maker” is a fascinating work of fiction, but —- at the end of the day —- whoever doubted that irrational science and irrational religion would produce anything but a tragic mess?

FICTION

“The Angel Maker: A Novel” by Stefan Brijs; Penguin; 346 pages; $15