re:mote voices

Title: Antwerp
Author: Nicholas Royle
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

When was the last time you read a novel set in Belgium? Written by a man from Manchester? I have to say it isn’t something I’ve read too many times. Nicholas Royle sets this curious novel primarily in the Belgian city of Antwerp, though his characters are prone to go a wandering round the rest of the country. The novel is filled with cultural references, covering Belgian artists, directors, and web writers – a couple of which actually appear as characters in the text, which is no doubt a curious experience for them!

The novel starts with Johnny Vos, an American who can trace his family back to Belgium, though that is beside the point. As a 17 year old Vos is gearing up to visit a prostitute, only to find her dead of an overdose. She died while listening to a record by Bauhaus. That is how it starts, Vos grows up to become a film maker, and is in Antwerp to make his second film. A film based on the life of the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, the sleeve of that particular Bauhaus record being one of his paintings. Unfortunately with only one scene shot, one of the girls from the red light district who he is using as extras is found murdered. With a second girl, who was going to appear in his next scene murdered shortly after. Vos is an obvious suspect, but then both girls also knew Danuta, a girl who works in a voyeuristic house open to the internet, then there is the fact that both girls bodies were found with a copy of one of Belgian film-maker Harry Kumel’s films.

Frank Warner is a British film critic, who has come to Antwerp to interview Vos about his Delvaux film. With the sudden surge of interest in the project, he finds himself also assigned to file a story on the murders. While there he receives a surprise visit from his girlfriend Sian, who has decided to come out and join him in Antwerp in the hope that they can solve some of the problems they have been having. However Warner finds himself taking on a more active role in events when Sian goes missing after she has met Vos by herself. From which point we have the makings of a taut thriller, one that we will have seen in the cinema numerous times, but I have less experience of in the novel.

Antwerp can be difficult to get into at times, Royle changing the narrative voice regularly – going through third person for the bulk of the book, then switching to first person for a character who appears under the chapter heading “the narrator”, and then second person as we enter into the mind of the killer. This interrupts the pacing of the work initially. Having established the characters of Vos, Danuta and Warner we are gaining a certain speed, only to flip into a totally different pace as the narrator and owner of the internet house that Danuta works in describes his life in England, and how those led him to return home to Belgium. This in turn shifts again as we switch to the killers mind, piecing together his life style, then his actions, with some suggestions of how he came to be.

Throughout Royle supplies cultural references. When Sian arrives in Antwerp, there is mention of the local fashion designers. Vos reflects on Delvaux’s contemporaries, as well as those other film makers who have tackled the subject. Or the band 48 Cameras, who have been recommended to Vos as possibly being suitable for the soundtrack to his film. The history of Harry Kumel’s film work is explored. Then there is also a thread about abandoned places, and how the Belgian attitude is different to other countries as demonstrated by the abandoned-places.com website. There are also other references, which are probably more coincidental than deliberate – one of the early chapters being called Dark Entries, which is the name of a Belgian music festival, or another called Frames A Second, which is obviously a film reference, but also the name of a Belgian band, then there is Trans-Europ Express, which is another film reference, though also the title of one of Kraftwerk’s most well known songs.

All of which combines to make Antwerp a particularly curious novel, one which is far from the run of the mill thriller some might expect from the initial premise. Even the technique of changing view points switches from being a little off putting to being compulsive – as the novel progresses, and he starts to mix the threads, at points from paragraph to paragraph, you find yourself drawn in a lot more. This technique also creates an extra level of tension, as we watch and judge to what degree the separate strands match up, and just how much time that leaves before someone else dies.