It is considered Mulisch's masterpiece and was voted best book in the Dutch language in a 2007 poll among the readers of NRC Handelsblad. Part Four is entitled “The End of the End.” Would that it had been so, without another 260 pages to get through.The Discovery of Heaven ( Dutch: De ontdekking van de hemel) is a 1992 novel by Dutch writer Harry Mulisch. The novel takes itself far too earnestly. I’ll give him a few twinkles of the eye, but just a few.
Even irony is utterly absent: the author just doesn’t have the stuff for any of it. So on the surface you have an interesting plot, but as Mulisch strives to raise it to the level of philosophy or spirituality, his attempt is an utter failure. whose baby? And much as Mary Magdalene disappears from the original Jesus narrative, Mulisch throws Ada under the bus with a coma and she is no longer really part in the evolving story, most of which has to do with Quentin trying to find his father. The author concocts his version of a virgin birth for Quentin by having two suitors, Max and Onno, have sex with Ada, their amour-in-common, on the same night and she, of course, becomes pregnant with. They get broken to bits and nobody gets them. But – but – he was returning them to the peoples he felt were their rightful owners, the Israelis, so go figure. And if that were not enough, also causing his son, Quentin, to disappear – poof! – (with a surfeit of ridiculous archetypal symbolism) through the mystical “Golden Gate” of Jerusalem, again with no apparent reason unless one is to infer the angels did it because he stole the Ten Commandments stone tablets from a Catholic church. This is evidenced by their blowing the head off Max, one of the main characters, with a meteor for no apparent reason.
What one comes away with is that these two angels lack the wisdom or emotional IQ to do their job well.
The story and the characters’ behavior is guided and determined, we’re led to believe, by two angels who converse in the Prologue, at the beginning of each Part (which the author names Intermezzos), and the Epilogue. The author has attempted to write the story of God and Mary and Joseph and Jesus (and Heaven? Heaven?) for modern times (for him, the 1970s). Now, here are some of my major problems with The Discovery of Heaven, and be forewarned: spoiler alert.
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