Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role.

Though the novel describes itself as ‘a horror story’, it’s more a salutation to the power of the natural world and a celebration of difference. Tokarczuk is revisiting Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain, using Mann’s original as her template – a hard act to follow. It’s the same setting and timeframe – that golden, apparently calm period leading up to the first world war. Even the opening, with a young innocent entering the enclosed world of ill-health in the Silesian mountains is mirrored. But Tokarczuk brings a new perspective to the scene: the female gaze.

Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a student from Lviv, hopes the austere medical regime will heal his lungs and see him home for Christmas. On his first day, he walks into the dining room to find, on the table, a pair of boots, ‘attached to a body, the woman who brought his breakfast’. The dead woman is the wife of the guesthouse owner, and she has hanged herself.

A suicide could be seen as something of a setback to the patients’ peace of mind, but Frau Opitz’s death fails to interrupt the comfortable routine. A daily glass or three of schwarmerei, the local liquor, soon restores good cheer, sometimes generating hallucinogenic euphoria. Swirling the green liquid, cigar smoke thick in the air, the gentlemen return to their discussions.