The Procedure

It all started with the creation of Adam. But doesn't the bible tell us that man and woman were created equally? If so, Eve could not have been the first woman, because she was created out of Adam's rib. Who is than the first woman? The answer: Lilith. When Victor Werker is born nobody has a clue that he will turn out to be one of the most renowned scientist of the twenty-first century. His future accomplishment will come close to what God did when he created man: he will give life to death material, a new form of life called the eobiont. But is this a good thing or will he have to justify his actions because he unwillingly created an evil Lilith?Harry Mulish is at his best in this metaphysical story about the most powerful subject of all time: life. At the start of the story you easily loose track of what it is all about, but this is clearly done on purpose. As some kind of inauguration the reader is offered a speed course in the biblical study of letters and numbers. Once you have struggled through this first episode the impact of what follows is even more surreal.Slowly but steadily the scope of the book widens and flirts with topics like the human genome, twin studies and Egyptology. Although the book nears epic proportions, Mulish never looses track of the essence. Constantly he surprises the reader with new viewpoints and digs deeper in the soul of the protagonist. Victor Werker is not different from anyone else, although his impact on science has been enormous. On the run for the past, he does nothing but chase his own shadow. When finally he notices that the future has much in common with what has been, he can do nothing but start to embrace his past. Like atoms that collide, this act of defeatism leads to total catastrophe, but also to the sweetest redemption. Only a limited amount of books can force the reader to start rereading them the moment you turn that last page. The Procedure is certainly one of the few. Without seemingly any effort Harry Mulish has again created a Masterpiece.

"The Procedure" (2001), by Harry Mulisch (b. 1927), is the thoughtful story of Victor Werker, a genetics scientist at UC Berkeley who explores the meaning of life from a scientific angle, inventing a new form of life called the eobiont, and with a philosophical tone, writing fatherly autobiographical letters to his daughter Aurora, named for the Roman goddess of dawn.The book starts with the legendary story of Rabbi Jehudah Loew (Löw), a leader of the Jewish community of Prague in 1592, called by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to make him a golem, a man-made being of clay. He fears sacrilege, not to mention abject failure, but ultimately agrees. Loew is a man of Hebrew letters, the symbolic glyphs of his faith. Will his knowledge of those sacred symbols help him uncover the metaphysical key to life, bestowing it upon lifeless clay?From Loew's colorful Prague, we jump back to our own time, to the story of Victor Werker's birth in Amsterdam a few years after World War Two, and the various tales and complications of the pregnancy and birth. Victor becomes a geneticist, and studies the letters of genetic sequencing, A, C, G, and T, the idiomatic symbols of his own profession. Will his education of those four letters unlock the scientific mystery of life, granting it to lifeless matter?Victor invents an organism he calls the eobiont, "Life's Dawn". He becomes famous, and suffers the jealousy of Barend Brock, a colleague spurned by Victor after he tries to take credit for Victor's discovery. Victor diarizes his relationship to Clara, including Clara's pregnancy and their break-up, through letters to their daughter Aurora.This novel is foremost of ideas. Today's metaphysical novelist's challenge seems to update the tale of Frankenstein (or Prometheus) to the age of genetics. Rabbi Loew's story is fascinating, and Victor Werker's struggles are interesting, but the book would benefit by describing more clearly the motivations of Loew and the Emperor, or delving more deeply into Victor's goals in life and career. Such details might help flesh the text out a bit more fully. Mulisch is a fine writer, and his novel "The Assault" (1982) is undoubtedly one of the more brilliant pieces of contemporary fiction from Europe today, but "The Procedure" does not weave tight the threads it has spun.Nonetheless, "The Procedure" is a well-paced novel (230pp), and contains a number of interesting ideas, regarding the nature of life, love, and history. It can be recommended to anyone who wants to think about the nature of life, and reflect upon the often discordant dichotomy between the spiritual and the scientific.

Genetic engineering, the mapping of the Human Genome, and Cloning are all intensely debated issues at present. All are generally viewed as parts of the absolute leading edge of high technology. Genetically engineered life forms have been patented, the Human Genome has been mapped, and despite the political and religious protestations, cloning has continued to duplicate ever more complex replicas of life. And while laws are contemplated and passed forbidding the cloning of a human, it is not only likely, but also probable that such research proceeds somewhere.The creation of life by mortal man has been routinely held as the ultimate taboo against nature and deeply held religious beliefs. Harry Mulisch writes in his book, "The Procedure", of two instances of creation and demonstrates the idea and perhaps the practice is not only far from new, it is centuries old. In the late 16th Century a Rabbi creates a Golem for a King, the procedure for which is outlined in a 3rd Century Text. Then in the 20th Century a Scientist creates a very primitive organic organism from non-organic materials, which gains the name eobliant. A Golem and the primitive organism that is created 400 years later have little in common as final products. The latter is a test tube creation while the former is, well the book will explain.The commonality between these two events is obvious, and if I read the work correctly, the obvious is not what the author intended. The writing is deceptively straightforward to read. The Rabbi has an arguably valid and selfless reason for what he does, our contemporary scientist does not. The author diverges along the way with the tale of Frankenstein, the author and her contemporaries, but writing about an act and practicing it are widely separated issues.Our scientist is also portrayed as being at the very least eccentric. He relates much of his story through letters he writes to his daughter who never lived. While the letters are to her, they are sent to the woman who would have been the child's mother. She left him for he failed her at the critical moment in their relationship, a moment that should not have been an issue for a father much less a man of science, and a man who was manipulating artificial life himself. For all the notoriety his creation has brought him, he gains no piece of mind, and constantly erodes as a person until he is having fictional conversations with a woman that would have been his wife about the cloning of their stillborn child. Cloning is a physical reproduction only, the mind, or the soul, if you prefer, is not replicated.As I mentioned the book can read as deceptively straightforward, and my reading may be completely off the mark. Either way the book is a great piece of work, and a tremendous read. More than one reading would probably be appropriate.

In many ways, I admire this book more than Mulisch's deservedly decorated opus The Discovery of Heaven. The Procedure is a tightly written novel that manages to incorporate a number of TDOH's humanist themes in a more complex and disturbing manner. This book is much, much more than a re-telling of the golem myth and a cautionary tale about pride. (And in case you hadn't noticed, Mulisch is proud to be an egomaniac so he ain't about to warn anyone about pride anytime soon.) The two odd chapters that open the book are easy to overlook once the narrative begins to unfold, but they ultimately serve as a sort of Rosetta stone for unraveling the novel's mysteries. When a book has the epigraph "So cleverly did his art conceal its art," the author is warning the reader to pay very close attention. I don't want to argue that this book displays an "either you get it or you don't" dynamic, because it's complex enough to yield new interpretations every time you read it, but, of the dozen or so reviews I've read, only one mentioned what I believe to be is the central metaphor of the novel. I find this troubling only because the mainstream reviews suggest that this is a minor, simple work that is easily digestible and of little consequence. Newsflash: when the brain and book collide, it's not always the book that is wanting. While the protagonist's creation of an a simple organic lifeform from inorganic matter does parallel the rabbi's creation of a golem, the novel's initial chapters suggest a much more immediate parallel to the golem than the largely undefined lifeform created by Victor. I don't want to ruin it for anyone, so I'll just say it's the best novel of the year (outside of Franzen's Corrections) and that everyone should read it. If you haven't read THOD, you should read that first, since it's more straightforward than this book.