Culture

What would you sacrifice to have everything you ever wanted? What happens if you sell your soul, but there is no afterlife to suffer in? John Banville recreates Goethe’s Mephistopheles in twentieth-century Ireland, bringing the old religious parable into a modern, secular setting, where God and the Devil are replaced by maths and randomness. Is suffering self-inflicted, is it chance, or is it all meant to be? How bad can a personal hell get?

Gabriel Swan had a twin brother who died at birth, so enters the world with a sense of incompleteness. He emerges as a mathematical savant, obsessed with whole numbers and the process of ordering phenomena around him. He amazes his teachers and terrifies his mother, is an oddity at school, and mostly stays in his room doing more and more sickeningly complicated sums. The strange, lonely teenager meets a peculiar group of people in the woods one day: a sad, obese scientist, a lopsided but mesmerising mute girl, and the tall, thin, irresistibly devilish Felix. They invite Gabriel into the decaying mansion where they live, and introduce him to a plethora of selfish pleasures. The scientist entertains him with paradoxical equations, and Sophie the deaf-mute introduces him to sex. Felix is full of advice and suggestions, and amused by their horrific consequences. A mine explodes in his proximity, and he smirks at the men on fire. He teams Gabriel up with a professor, attempting to discover the meaning of life through maths. Nothing brings its expected satisfaction. Unlike Goethe’s Faust in his pact with Mephisto, Gabriel’s search for material pleasure brings nothing but earthly misery.

The book’s two parts are called “marionettes” and “angels”. Are the characters controlled by a puppet-master, or do they possess free-will? I like reading books partly because I like finding order, coincidence, and design in their tiny worlds which I don’t believe exist in real life. So this book’s concept of a scientist trying to find the formula which will reduce human experience to an equation appealed to me. Some of Professor Kosak’s lines could instead be the author talking about his process of writing: “This is the world, look around you, look at it! You want certainty, order, all that? Then invent it!” But Gabriel and Professor Kosak’s search for order descends into nighmarish chaos, spiralling downward to new depths of depravity and horror. Gabriel’s life is systematically broken down and pulled apart, leaving him a broken husk with an expression of shock at the monstrosities chance can bring: “The loneliness. The being-beyond. Indescribable. Where I went, no-one could follow.”

The language is sumptuously grotesque. Gabriel describes his surroundings: “Now for the first time I saw the world around me radiant with pain, the glass in the window suffering the sun’s harsh blade, the bed like a stricken ox kneeling on its stumps, that bag of lymph above me, dripping, dripping.” Elements of gothic romance are are mixed with B-movie horror: silent, pale women; deadly black dogs; mad scientists; evil doctors; and sinister clergy co-exist. Gabriel’s body and mind eventually seem as pieced-together as Frankenstein’s monster. Felix is steampunk in his top hat and tails. Reading Mefisto is like going to an insane carnival full of gruesome, gaping clown mouths and never-ending, nauseating fair-ground rides with mad repetitive music.

There is humour in it, but it is dark – very, very dark, like when Gabriel is given the wrong body to identify at the morgue. Whoops! The horrible little details of life, the pink fluid dripping out of the strung-up carcass onto the floor, are ar the fore of this book. A mouse is crushed to death by bare hands, the smell of an old dish-rag is described, gross-out after gross-out is served up in the most lavish language. I wouldn’t recommend this book if you are feeling low, but despite its misery, Mefisto is the kind of exquisite book that deserves a second reading, and will linger in my mind for a long time.