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Antwerp
by Nicholas Royle
(Serpent's Tail, £10.00, 288 pages, trade paperback; June 2004.)
Review by Roger Keen
Writers of distinction tend to have unique personal themes and motifs
to which they  return
and re-explore again and again, harvesting greater and greater richness.
For Nicholas Royle one such preoccupation is surrealism--both within
the texture of his work itself and as a subject, as material. In particular
he has an ongoing intrigue with the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux, whose
work is filled with equivocation, centring on eerie dreamlike cityscapes
populated by beautiful somnambulant nude women. In an earlier novel,
Saxophone Dreams, a character studies Delvaux and scenes from
the paintings manifest in his dreams; in Antwerp that idea is
taken several stages further.
We meet Johnny Vos, an American fringe filmmaker of Belgian extraction,
who had a formative Delvauxesque experience in youth and is now in Antwerp
to make a documentary about the artist. It is very much an underground
type project, probably without official funding, for Vos goes about
his work in an erratic, desultory manner, like the true artist he believes
himself to be. One aspect of the film involves re-creating tableaux
of the paintings, and for this Vos hires sex workers from the city's
red light district to pose nude as Delvaux women. Then two of the girls
are found murdered in bizarre circumstances, which indicate the work
of a serial killer. The killer's notable trademark is to place videotapes
of the movies of real life cult Belgian director Harry Kümel with the
bodies. Other trademarks, revealed later, show an obsession with Delvaux
not unlike that of Johnny Vos.
Meanwhile British film writer Frank Warner--who appeared in Royle's
previous novel, The Director's Cut--is in Antwerp to do a piece
on Vos, and inevitably becomes embroiled in the murder mystery as the
connections to Vos become apparent. In a wide ensemble of characters,
Frank is very much the central figure with whom we identify, and whom
the complex skeins of the plotting revolve around. His girlfriend Siân
is accompanying him in Antwerp, and after a meeting with Vos she disappears,
presumed captured and likely to be the killer's next victim. With Siân
missing, Frank turns detective himself after losing confidence in the
efforts of the flatfooted Belgian police. He scans Kümel's films for
clues to the killer's motivations, surfs the net and puts out feelers
for any conceivable leads. He makes better progress than the police.
In other chapters we get the killer's point of view in the anonymous
second person, witnessing his affectless methods and learning of his
terrible childhood in a series of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks
reminiscent of the cinematic style of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
Other dubious characters prowl the scene. First person narration is
used for the voyeuristic Wim De Blieck, diamond dealer and proprietor
of the porn webcam house where the girls associated with the Vos film
worked. Then there is the still more sinister Jan Spitzner, one time
webbed-footed freak show child and webmaster of a freakish site filled
with crime scene and morgue pictures of dubious origins. The finger
of suspicion points everywhere. Could either Vos, De Blieck or Spitzner
be the killer? Or could they be implicated in other ways?
Having tilted towards the crime-thriller form in The Matter of the
Heart and The Director's Cut, Royle now goes for it in a
much more full-bloodied way, whilst simultaneously retaining his own
agenda. Though the novel begins slowly, the tension never lets up as
the myriad pattern of clues and connections builds into a complex, cryptic
mystery. And Royle creates a compelling mood and atmosphere by meticulous
attention to detail. The topography of Antwerp and its surroundings--including
the network of abandoned buildings which make up the killer's territory--are
again revealed in a vivid cinematic writing style, which is further
bolstered by continuous references to cinema itself, from the Wes Craven
slasher movie Last House on the Left, to the cult films of Harry
Kümel, to the art house classic Last Year at Marienbad. And behind
the film references, and everything else lurks the all-pervading presence
of Paul Delvaux, his spirit looming large in the Belgian zeitgeist and
in the hearts and minds of individuals, as though his rarefied brand
of surrealism was a major part of the mainstream of life.
This is what Royle does so well: to present us with our everyday world
slightly skewed and re-balanced according to altered, arcanely weird
values, which we can't quite pin down. In Antwerp he creates
a brilliant fusion of familiar genres and his own specialized obsessions
to form a new fictional alloy that is both page-turningly gripping and
strikingly artistically original. He surfs the thriller plotting regime
with great sureness, never once falling into the traps of predictability,
unbelievability or plain old cliché. The descriptions of characters
under extreme stress are accurate and viscerally telling. His killer
has the 'creative' aspects of a Thomas Harris Tooth Fairy or Buffalo
Bill, coupled with a well-realised case history. And the way the requirements
of the killer's ritualistic modus operandi draw out the tension
towards the end make for a real cliffhanger of a climax.
Ultimately Antwerp succeeds in drawing together all its complex
threads and tangents, but ends in an elliptical manner reminiscent of
the best European cinema. It is a thoroughly satisfying, thought-provoking
and beautifully realized work that will keep you pondering for days
and will seep into your dreams.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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