By Dexter Palmer*
“The Eye of Goliath”, the Argentine writer Diego Muzzio’s dark-humored, macabre puzzle box of a novel, is set just after World War I, in an Edinburgh sanitarium that “harbored a select group of the many mentally ill people who had come back from the war.”
The institution’s psychiatrist, Edward Pierce, conducts controversial research into hypnosis as a means of treating mental illness. His peers think his experiments are “destined to fail before too long,” while Pierce finds their “methods, based on pharmacology and electricity, to be ineffective and obsolete.”
A new patient, an engineer named David Bradley, arrives at the sanitarium after being stranded on an island with an abandoned lighthouse, which he was sent to assess by his employers.
Pierce sees a chance to prove the viability of his innovative psychiatric procedures.
Traumatized and unable to speak, Bradley is possessed by a need to swim at all times. He has documented his time on the island in a diary, which makes up the second part of the book and details his descent into madness and persistent terror. Muzzio then returns to Pierce and the treatment of his perplexing patient.
This complexly plotted novel is deeply intertextual, and Muzzio uses other writers’ themes as a hip-hop producer might use samples, crafting new tunes by borrowing fragments of familiar melodies and arranging them in new ways.
Allusions abound to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Dante’s “Inferno,” the first Book of Samuel, the work of the writer and naturalist William Henry Hudson and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
The most significant influence, however, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novella “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”
A few mentions function as blinking neon signposts (Pierce has a copy of the book in his bedroom; the lighthouse engineer David Alan Stevenson, Robert’s real-life cousin, makes an appearance), but subtler engagements with the novella also come into view.
Pierce’s neuralgia, a condition of crippling headaches caused by shrapnel lodged in his head, is kept in check by increasingly frequent doses of morphine.
His habit echoes Dr Jekyll’s dependence on his secret elixir, which he first imbibes to deliver his evil alter ego, Hyde, to the world (and then takes to restrain Hyde from appearing on his own).
An act carried out on a pair of corpses is viewed from two perspectives, one that regards it as a desecration and the other as a performance of remorse; where one person might see a Hyde, another might see a Jekyll. Twins and duplicates appear throughout, including one clever moment when the book itself becomes doubled. In its elegant, sometimes playfully quaint prose (ably translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery) and in its structure, particularly the documents that make up Bradley’s section, the novel gestures toward the Gothic without wholly turning into pastiche.
Behind Pierce’s and Bradley’s plotlines are memories of the recently ended war, which both men would prefer to forget.
Flashbacks to the phantasmagoria of trench warfare, a “fabulous catalyst for insanity,” are the novel’s most unsettling passages.
Pierce views the personification of war as a grotesque distortion of Carroll’s Alice, a girl with “glimmering eyes who went about with a jingling bunch of keys, opening all the chambers of the mind where legions of babbling demons had been shut away.”
The trenches are where every man is forced by circumstance to bring forth a Hyde, not for the pleasure that Stevenson’s Hyde takes in violence, but for mere survival. In this compelling novel, the fates of both Pierce and Bradley suggest that no matter how justified one may be for letting Hyde run riot the first time, it is extremely difficult to contain him again.
*The New York Times
