Awake | Sublunar | Visions and Temptations, Harald Voetmann (Trans. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen), New Directions Publishing, £12.99

Harald Voetmann can trace the inspiration for his trilogy of absurdist, historical novellas back to a single moment. It began with a nightmare he experienced while travelling through the southern Apennines, translating passages from Petronius’ Satyricon. He awoke, sat outside, and began writing compulsively, depicting the contours of Ascea’s coastal mountain slopes in meticulous detail, blending the present with Petronius’ vivid, historical past. From this primordial inspiration was born a loosely-connected set of stories, each centred around a protagonist of considerable genius. Awake follows the last days of Pliny the Elder, the venerable Roman historian, naturalist and statesman who would perish in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Sublunar captures the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, one of the last to study the stars before the invention of the telescope in late Renaissance Denmark.

His final instalment, Visions and Temptations, accompanies the 11th-century scholar and composer Othlo of St Emmeram, dean of the abbey at Regensburg, through his final days on earth, and his first glimpses of the realms beyond. We meet each of our narrators at the twilight of their lives, wrestling with the great questions of humanity. Pliny has hopes of cataloguing the known world. Brahe, of divining the mysteries of the cosmos. Blessed Othlo of sacrificing all earthly temptations in pursuit of eternal salvation.

Each is consumed by a fascination with nature and a desire to overcome it; none more so than pious Othlo, who, from his deathbed, slips in and out of consciousness, flickering between the tedium of his precious, cloistered life in Bavaria and the realms of the divine: the holy frolicking of headless angels in the Garden of Heaven, and the monstrous world-ocean of Aesphydogyllus. The barren, purgatorial Necubia recalls a spectral unease akin to Lernet-Holnia’s Baron Bagge, whose strong sense of realism is ripe with metaphysical undertones, while the carnal horrors of Antiherusalem (Hell) recall subtler passages from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation; the winding tower descending into the earth, the fungal scripture upon its walls, are reminiscent of the Tapestry of Hell, the cobbled, winding, industrial streets of the Great Enemy’s lair.

Thematically simplistic, Voetmann cannot fail at times to stagger, to overwhelm. From the moment Othlo collapses, face-first, into his bowl of morning gruel, we are thrust into a world between life and death where nothing is settled. Chapters blur the lines between reality and the supernatural, while poetic metre and abrupt, mid-sentence line-changes imbue the text with a fluid sense of disjunction. Though each instalment in the trilogy bears no relation to the next, they are connected by a style, theme and form every bit as idiosyncratic as their narrators. Inspired by the ancient tragedies of antiquity rather than contemporary literary realism, this ‘puppet drama’ is more akin to mythological tales or scripture than modern realism, and is laced with philosophical lamentations. The author’s voice is given paramountcy throughout, the plot threadbare and the structure driven by excerpts rather than themes. The result is a surreal vignette of the human condition; a Dionysian elegy whose realism is the essence of its unreality.

Voetmann paints with a captivating prose that illuminates both nature and the supernatural. In Awake, he describes the rich, earthy hues of cinnabar, ochre, and bronze, evokes patinas, arid slopes and cracked marble pavements, and entices the reader into the ‘narrow, steep paths between the levels of landscaping, the umber dust whirling and settling on sandals and feet and in the pleat of a toga’s hem’. One can almost smell the Tyrrhenian, looking out above the olive groves at the smouldering slopes of Vesuvius. Fighting pits, colonnades, slave-driven cranes: ‘we skipped along between the stones in the alley to avoid soiling our sandals in the shit and piss emptied out of the windows at night, chewing lupine seeds or a slab of bread’. Death, lust and sweat commingled, baked into the earth.

Sublunar, by contrast, is stark and spartan, black walls and white skies flecked with crimson and bronze. ‘The snow lies finely sprinkled like spilt flour on a kitchen floor… The Moon shines bluish, clear through the flimsy cloud cover. She makes the seas rise, the blood flow, the black bile collect.’ A sense of violence, of anger, bleeds from the towers of the observatory at Uraniborg; a cultish worship among Brahe’s apprentices, even as the peasantry around them starves, freezes in the shadow of the plague. Frozen mud, gulls’-blood broth, breath condensed on thin windows and fine instruments. ‘This morning I wandered out onto the frozen sea, nearly stumbled on a wave that lay hidden in the snow.’ Monotony, sanctuary, and the cruel beyond.

Visions and Temptations offers a sense of the endless, spreading out into acres of vastness: ‘Saturnina, Albanus, Aphrodisius. They are all there with you, strolling in their long robes, which seem to be woven with light, yet are fully covered’. A walled garden, corridors of black iron, the ceaseless pealing of bells. Edenic brocade. Plainchant. Zarathustra. ‘There are stains of sound in the silence, reverberations alien to the silence’. And a sense of the particular. Of moss and woodland and worn stone slab; red sloes and spilt oats. Fresh grass, soot and sweat; white-hot sparks and spectral gold. This has shades, at its best, of Nabokov, particularly his fantastical short stories – think The Wood Sprite or The Word – splashed with Pale Fire. Clipped, precise syntax pulls one in with an intoxicating force, colourful, disconcerting and rich with meaning. Voetmann’s English translator, Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, is to be highly commended for distilling the text with such verve, colour and clarity.

This poetic style also serves a wider purpose. Voetmann’s protagonists possess a fierce intellectual gravitas, and we are left in no doubt that they are, by some measure, ‘great’ men, expressed through their captivating command of language. They wield this liberally and seductively, obscuring their moral and spiritual depravity, wilfully contemptuous of those deemed ‘lesser’ – less knowledgeable, less capable, less pious. A certain ignorance, even a fear, is behind their obsession with nature and their detachment from worldly concerns. Exposing the unnaturalness of knowledge-seeking, even of knowledge itself, is the fulcrum of Voetmann’s oeuvre. In their quest to subdue nature, his protagonists each encounter the divine, and it is on this border between the supremely ordinary and the divinely extraordinary that Voetmann weaves his narrative. Reality is punctured by the whispering of this void; history folds into myth, and the grotesque bleeds into the sacred. Pliny’s unslakable thirst to know culminated in his 37-volume Naturalis Historia, an attempt to catalogue the known world through rigorous study and meticulous categorisation. For he believed that to know nature is to command it: to submit it to his will: ‘I have collected twenty thousand examples of nature’s sublime cruelty… We must learn to enjoy the cruel game, and so be it that it is at our own expense.’

Othlo shares Pliny’s disgust, both of nature and his contemporaries. The lame-legged Brother Gehrwas, the careless Brother Æwrhul. On his deathbed he is trapped amid their humdrum potterings, unable to move nor speak, exposed to the rhythms of the outside world; the heaving trill of flute players, jesters and market-goers beyond the abbey walls. Set free by his mysterious ‘spirit guide’ to tour the heavens, his hallucinatory encounters with the Gods drip with disdain for the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘common’. ‘If you could see the garbage they sell in town, Dionysius, piles of rubbish and by no means cheaper for that reason.’ When he encounters a seal-like creature in the land of Aesphydogyllus, he recounts that ‘it had a long, pointy beak, not unlike a carrion bird’s, but spotted with yellow and red, which reminded me of the market clowns and therefore repulsed me…’

No aspect of creation is beyond his scornful wit. This impatient and haughty moralising, this condescending idealism, is rooted in a perverted sense of piety, at once self-loathing and self-congratulatory. He sets a bar so high that few, if any, can meet it, delighting as others fall short of his scholarly and spiritual standards, mocking his fellow brothers as half-witted sinners. The human connection is sublated by an unnatural desire to dominate, to conquer. Callous, detached, those possessed with superior faculty feast on the casual denigration of those deemed slower or less able. Each strives for completeness. For an ‘end’. Wisdom, prudence, humility, judgement; all have been cast aside in the pursuit of knowing. It is a deeply Romantic critique of that most modern of urges.

In their pursuit of the Divine, Voetmann’s characters reveal the gulf between their intellect and their moral and spiritual depravity. A certain barbarism necessarily pervades the texts, brutal and raw in its honesty. Sexual imagery is graphic to the point of gratuity and revulsion. Pliny’s exploits paint a particularly disturbing portrait of how separate pre-Christian Roman morality is from our own, while Othlo’s excursion to the brothels of Hell is a manifest Boschian nightmare. Yet for the most part Voetmann’s prose steps in to save the text from outright reprobacy. Hubris, deviancy, carnal desire, casual disregard; these themes are all central to Voetmann’s Babel-esque critique of man’s boundless desire to dominate, and a certain tolerance for discomfit is required when reading. Visions perhaps strikes the best balance of the three in this regard, between the more amusing and philosophical ruminations of Awake and the dark, violent undertones of Sublunar. While knottier passages require perseverance, they are always rewarded, and never free from a twinkling capstone of humour.

Indeed, as much as theological or philosophical concerns abound, an equally real strength of Voetmann’s works is that they are deeply funny. Gifted, arrogant, utterly self-absorbed, his characters flit through the world blind to their own caricatures, cut off from the world they claim to know, to study, to love. Supine, corpulent, Pliny sputters proclamations on any and all matters:

Pythagoras must be mad to speak of cosmic harmonies. The noise of the universe to me has always been the sound of something heavy and solid, hauled by Germanic and Numidian treadmill slaves. A constant sound of strain only surpassed occasionally by the lash of the whip.

Casually imperious, he readily dispenses thoughts on companions, associates, or mistress Nature herself. ‘… The goat is a shameless mix of idiotic urges, garnished with the same elongated bristles that Greek sages proudly grew on their chins’. Brahe concurs, huffing that ‘among the general public Pythagoras is better known for his golden leg than his mathematical discoveries’. Cantankerous Othlo keeps up this tradition. ‘In the stalls and shops only the most useless and indecently priced wares remain… Far away, a flute trilling, which does little praise to God.’ ‘In my panic, I sought a place to take cover, finding only the colossal lamb, whom I had playfully dubbed Archipresbyter Werinharius due to his remarkably naive appearance and the slightly deeper, more preachy tone of his bleats compared to the other lambs.’ As unintentionally amusing as they are absurd, Voetmann extracts a pared-back humour of wit and depth from characters ripe with contradiction.

Contemporary resonances abound. Voetmann’s characters emerge as coruscating critiques of the modern, the technocratic, and full-throated condemnations of contemporary academia. Of that certain image of the scholar; the all-seeing, all-knowing font of wisdom, and the redemptive belief in knowledge. Each of his great men exposes their peculiarity, their remarkable ignorance, dressed up in ethical paternalism, passing judgement on others without possessing it themselves. Chained to Pliny’s desk, the slave-scribe Diocles – forced to transcribe the wheezing thoughts of ‘woolly, grunting larva’ of a master – is among the wisest of Voetmann’s characters:

…there’s too much drivel in my head, he laments, and too little beauty. It’s the master’s fault. It’s his voice haunting me, cataloguing every trivial detail of the world and fretting about all those details. The master’s mapping of nature doesn’t amount to anything, it only steeps the world in doubt and hesitation and tedious references to other authors’ doubts and hesitations.

Yet he is careful in his critique. It is felt subtly, and often in moments of dry humour. This is a real strength of Voetmann’s work, for though he could quite easily slip into dissonance or anachronism he keeps it anchored, skewering the contemporary through compelling reconstructions of the past. It is only on reflection we find deeper meaning beneath the satire and solipsism.

Voetmann’s works will not be for everyone. Profound meditations on modernity and the modern, they are possessed of richness that demands re-reading, bristling with a fibrous, cud-like philosophy that cannot easily be distilled nor digested. Dark, amusing, and disturbingly intelligent, his protagonists embody some of the best and the worst of humanity. Pliny, festering, lurid and devoted to the world, tramples the lesser, the downtrodden, without care nor concern, as easily as the great imperium he helped build. Brahe, tyrannical and brooding, king of his island fief, the ever-watchful eye who sees all and knows none. And blessed Othlo, whose unnatural repression has curdled the soul, is unrepentant, cursed to be forever roving the in-between. Ending his series on an ambiguous high note, he invites readers to engage with their struggles. In their greatness, each was found wanting. Yet in wanting, perhaps each of them was found.