When a novel that has already been made into a film is chosen as a nation’s best book ever, I tend to become suspicious. Obviously, only those novels that are of above average quality make it to the screen, but in most cases I feel they also lose part of their credibility because of it. Only a top few novels survive their adaptations and remain the masterpieces they are for years to come, when the DVDs are already catching dust on the shelves of remainder shops. When everybody starts calling these books brilliant, though, I can’t help but wonder who actually read, and who merely watched.
This is precisely what happened yesterday in the Netherlands, when Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven was voted best Dutch novel ever in a three hour TV marathon cum literary quiz. Somehow I knew this was going to happen, before even learning who were the nominees. Mulisch is somewhat of a demigod in the country and the novel has been a roaring success.
The Discovery of Heaven is a Gesamtkunstwerk, combining all of Mulisch’s themes and interests into one magnum opus; a kaleidoscope of history, art, science, politics and religion. It follows the stories of a number of people, chosen ones you could argue, who through a series of events serve only one goal: to create a descendant called Quinten Quist who one day, together with his father, breaks in to the Lateran in Rome to purloin the original stone tables hidden there and take them to Jerusalem.
It’s not surprising this book has become regarded as a classic. Mix some The secret History atmosphere of academics together with the complex mysteries of Foucault’s Pendulum, add some Roman Catholic conspiracy à la The Da Vinci Code and paint a canvas as broad and sweeping as any Allende family drama and Bob’s your uncle. It’s a good book, well-written, a bit of a page turner, but not nearly as erudite or grand as I believe most people think it is. It’s also nearly a thousand pages long: a stretch by most people’s standards these days, and rather very long when the book doesn’t really surpasses mediocrity. So, yes, I wonder how many people actually read it, more than once for instance, and how many of these, without seeing the 2001 film, would remember the 1992 publication (translated into English in 1996).
But Mulisch is a good writer. Testament to that is his story of Dutch WWII tragedy The Assault. This book was also made into a film, by the recently deceased Fons Rademakers, and won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1987. But it wasn’t in yesterday’s top 10, along with a number of other novels an international audience might not know, but which certainly deserved to be in there.
The Dutch, these days, are a troubled people. They’ve seen a number of political and religious assassinations, they have been in political unrest ever since, and whereas they keep voting liberal (left of centre) they keep ending up with the same Christian prime minister. The Dutch wonder what went wrong with their social model of consensus and why they’re no longer the guiding country of Europe. They’re stuck between pessimism and despondency. That is why they choose ‘big’ books as their best ever, not great ones.
