Playing God

“That paranoid genre in which all events are geared toward the main character”--thus the narrator of this rich and finely crafted novel defines the novel as such. The definition may not hold for “loose baggy monsters” like “War and Peace” or even Harry Mulisch’s own recent and notably baggy “The Discovery of Heaven,” but it does very well for “The Procedure.” We follow scientist Victor Werker, the novel’s engaging hero, from his very conception, described in hilariously lurid detail; we learn about him both from within--in a series of letters he writes to his daughter--and from an omniscient narrator. And we want to learn about him. After all, he is the man closest to God since Adam: Werker has discovered how to create life--a mere blob, perhaps, but a living blob--from inorganic material.

Considering his achievement, Werker is disarmingly modest. He brushes it off as a career change: He has merely switched from chemistry to biology. True, he pooh-poohs the cloning fraternity--they merely imitate life; true, he is hoping for a call from the Swedish Academy. But he is also hoping for a call from his estranged partner and, although he never states it in so many words, the latter call means more to him than the former. The beauty of his character--and of the novel--is that he understands that creating life, even as the human race has always created it, is a tortuous process, one involving infinitely more subtleties than the process he has developed.

The description of the copulation that gave rise to Victor Werker may be hilarious, but the description of the birth itself is harrowing. It takes several days, and more pages. Then there is Werker’s daughter. Halfway through his letters to her, we realize that she is dead; we subsequently learn that she died in her mother’s womb. It is Werker’s inability to cope with the death that leads to his estrangement from the mother and--presumably--to his unconscious drive to create life by other means.

Werker’s letters make up the core of “The Procedure.” He writes them on his travels--first to UC Berkeley, where he is doing a stint as a regents lecturer; then to Venice, where he is giving a paper at a conference; and finally to Cairo, where he is involved in DNA research on mummies. He, or rather, Mulisch, gets the first two right--from the trivial (he knows that the Berkeley Slavic department is in Dwinelle Hall) to the sublime (he knows that Venice is “always more beautiful in the street than in the museum”). I assume he is equally on the mark with the pyramids, where I must trust him. And not being a scientist, I must also trust his explanations of the scientific basis for Werker’s discovery.

What I can attest to without compunction is the masterful use to which Mulisch puts his antecedents, the legends and literary works that deal with the perils of creating life, of playing God, as it were. He evokes the court of Emperor Rudolf II and his retinue to retell the legend of the golem fashioned from clay by Prague’s Rabbi Low (who, in a modern twist here, botches the Cabalist text and creates a maiden instead of the traditional male). He sends Werker to a student performance of “RUR” (1921), the once world-renowned play by another Czech, Karel Capek, which, by bringing the golem legend up to date, enriched the languages of the world with the word “robot.” And, of course, he invokes “Frankenstein” and its Miltonian epigraph: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man?” But he goes beyond literary history to treat literature as a metaphor for creation, implying that what Werker has done is not all that different from what great writers (and artists of every stripe; cave-paintings come up in this context as well) have been doing for centuries.

In the end, Mulisch has attempted in “The Procedure” what C.P. Snow attempted in his 1959 essay “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”: to reconcile the human sciences with the natural ones. He does so by pointing up their common and deep roots in the creative process. Werker’s discovery comes not from following the scientific method--as if one and only one, a cookbook of sorts, had ever existed--but from applying the process of science and recognizing that science changes with (and, in ways similar to) history.

Like many contemporary writers worth their salt, Mulisch charges a high admission to his works: The novel’s first few chapters--which he calls “documents”--are purposefully difficult. But Mulisch is the first writer I know to have admitted to the practice and incorporated it into the work. The second document opens: “You see. Our intention has succeeded. We are alone. Your impure fellow readers have fled head over heels....” May I encourage potential readers to persevere: The going gets smoother--by the final pages the novel has all but turned into a thriller, and the ending is a shocker--but the profundity and profound humanity remain.

We never do find out whether the Swedish Academy has made the pertinent call to Victor Werker, but it could do a good deal worse than to give a call to Harry Mulisch the next time round.