OMEGA MINOR. By Paul Verhaeghen. 691pp. Dalkey Archive. Paperback, Pounds 9.99.978 1 5647 8477 3.
Paul Verhaeghen's first novel, Omega Minor, which has just won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, spans the twentieth century, from the Berlin of the Third Reich to the 1990s, via the intellectual elite of 1950s Harvard, the desert of Los Alamos and the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Along the way, it takes in particle physics, the culture of memory, the philo- sophy of experience and identity, the Manhattan Project and German skinhead culture in the late twentieth century.
With such a range of themes and ideas, Omega Minor is a formidable book. It is, more importantly, a book about the unprecedented evils human beings have visited on one another over the course of the past century. Well over 600 pages long, in a translation from the orginal Flemish by the author (who is a US-based psychologist, specializing in cognitive ageing), it is a massively ambitious work, but one which is not without flaws.
The novelist throws down a challenge to the reader on the very first page, with a lurid passage describing a sexual act ("A lightning bolt hurls upward in a blinding curve of pristine white, the laws of gravity suspended for a quarter-second. There is a scream of triumph as the gushing garland - that string of boundless energy - spouts into the springtime air.") It would be a shame if readers were to find themselves unable to proceed past this opening, for the novel offers much of worth besides such overwrought descriptions.
There are three main narrative strands; Paul Andermans - like Verhaeghen a cognitive psychologist whose work focuses on memory - is transcribing the memories of Jozef De Heer, a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany, whom Andermans meets in hospital where he is recovering from an attack by skinheads. Andermans meanwhile is in love with Donatella, an ambitious and talented student of the great emigre physicist Goldfarb, who escaped to America from Nazi Germany but who has returned to Potsdam to make peace with his own wartime history. "Omega is the parameter that tells us what will happen to the universe, what will happen to us, and there is something seriously wrong with the value of that parameter", explains one of the characters, one of many assertions which indicate the scope of Verhaeghen's philosophical ambition. The Omega theory was Einstein's, which he later retracted, and it is this scientific notion of the universe's degradation that is at the philosophical heart of the novel.
Nevertheless, the novel's satisfactions do not all come from the weighty philosophical concerns that inspire the narrative and lead to some of its flights of intellectual explanation. Verhaeghen has also constructed a brilliant thriller. Just at the point when one might be ready to stop reading in frustration at the grandiloquence of the narrative, the story of the Holocaust survivor De Heer starts to unravel, subtly undermining all previous assumptions, drawing one further into the narrative maze. And if the explosive climax doesn't seem to fit the rest of the novel, that matters less than the fact that Omega Minor is a rare and satisfying example of a contemporary novel, serious, unafraid of its own ambition, and entirely, and happily, bereft of irony.
