Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose

In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected upon the special kind of paranoia that attends the ill individual. Each person is, by virtue of "being a little world", supremely conscious of a change in the atmosphere.

Illness appears, for Donne, as a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a sudden eclipse. It can simultaneously make one feel more themselves and self-alienated. Most horrible, in his estimation, is that the sick subject "hath enough in himself, not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself; to assist the sickness, to antedate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by sad apprehensions’. To dwell on the aberrant body is to conduct a morbid forecast.

For Donne, knowledge of disease is a "sad apprehension". The latter word attests to both understanding and anxiety. The subjects of Polish writer and Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, exist under this special atmosphere of apprehension. The majority of the people described in her book have all retreated to the mountainous Göbersdorf, in the Silesian mountains, in order to be treated for tuberculosis at its renowned sanatorium. The discovery of consumption’s cause, Koch’s bacillus, seems to offer them a way of controlling pathology through the sanitised structures of linguistic determination. As Donne, however, realised centuries before the events of this novel, set in the early years of the 20th century, the diagnosis can become the disease, especially when it comes to define the dread that harbours within us. As the repeated reference to Koch’s diagnosis by the patients in this novel demonstrates, prescription is not necessarily panacea and there is a culture of evasion and false belief at the sanatorium that chimes with this.

This novel is mainly about men. It is not, as the blurb’s claims for the "feminist parable" contained within might like you to infer, about women. We follow the story of Mieczysław Wojnicz, a deliberately endearing character, as he checks in to Herr Optiz’s Guesthouse for Gentleman. Here, he meets a range of men who, like him, are waiting for a room to become available in the sanatorium proper. Of course, the very mention of forthcoming and inevitable vacancies is considered a faux pas. Everyone believes the climate will cure them. The thought of dying from the disease that affects them all is unspoken and must, it seems, remain so.

There is a vast amount that should be left unspoken that isn’t in this novel. The men with whom Wojniz associates by circumstance are big talkers. It is not often that this redounds to their credit. Conversations, inspired by the hallucinogenic spiked local liquor that the guests drink, veer from faux-intellectual proselytising to paranoid conjecture. These meandering and always inconclusive arguments lend much of the objective substance of the book, though they are irritatingly insubstantial. Nearly always misogynistic, Tokarczuk takes care that her reader is aware of this keynote: "Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women". She goes one step further, informing us in an endnote that these torrid denouncements of the female sex archive views expressed by authors ranging from Plato to Yeats. That their views have been in some way endorsed by prior publication is somewhat shocking.

Yet the revelation comes too late to make any real difference to how we encounter them in the novel itself. Tokarczuk’s anti-woman anthology goes the way of many works which take this form. The eye glances off such extracts in search of less piecemeal subjects. Overwhelmed by these sexist extracts – which perhaps Tokarczuk is billing as the real source of terror in this novel – the reader is forced to go in ever more desperate search of the "health resort horror story" of the book’s subtitle.

The feeling that something horrible is about to happen induces a no doubt intentional readerly mode of paranoia. Like the painfully drawn-out conditions of tuberculosis, a violent consummation is outlined as an inevitability by the text, without conforming to an explicit timeframe. The narrative eases itself along in apparent banality, punctuated by prescriptions such as daily walks and (more surprisingly) heavy drinking. We are witnesses to the stark tragedy of a woman’s suicide, we hear of the fact that there is a graveyard of young men who have all died in the same month for a number of years, and the men exchange folkloric tales about witches who might still live in the surrounding forest. More often, however, the horror remains oblique, like an unexplained disturbance at the corners of vision.   

This, in turn, creates a sort of diseased consciousness that forces identification with the patients with which the novel deals, something that is only intensified by the occasional intrusion of a secondary and intriguingly alien narrative force. Wojnicz, always afraid (for reasons that become apparent) of being watched, is justified in his fears by this presence. Observing him, the narrative voice admits "[w]e find this movement fascinating, we like it’. In order to justify such an intrusive and minute attentiveness, they assert "[n]o, we do not regard it as an obsession […] People should get used to the fact that they are being watched’. This secondary voice shivers with indefinable intent and is one of the more interesting innovations in the text. It is a shame, therefore, that it disappears between the cracks in the floorboards for much of the middle part of the novel, only to return, with force, in order to voice the horror of its culmination.

It would be an injustice to say when, precisely, this comes for precisely the reasons outlined above. Suffice to say it comes, as with Donne’s atmospheres of illness, like a storm. There is a sudden unravelling of the elements that have so far guided this novel. Forces that lie far outside their bodies exact a fitting revenge on the men who have sought – through various means – to defy them. To try to explain the novel further would be to undo it. Strange and lyrical, Tocarczuk’s narrative campaigns for the beauty of being right in the middle of things without quite knowing how you got there.  

• The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
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