Gustav Meryink - 'The Golem'

This was a bit of an impulse purchase but a good one. The novel focuses upon the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Prague during the late nineteenth century. As Borges put it, it's a story set in an Eastern Europe on "the other side of the mirror" where the central framing narrative - that of the unnamed narrator's dream in which he becomes another man some thirty years previous - is stacked with further dreams and dislocations relating to the eponymous Golem, a monster of Kabbalistic legend that appears every thirty-three years in a room with no door. The doppleganger theme and a general mirroring of characters and events are deeply woven into the text: the narrator inhabits the body of Pernath and at times also becomes the Golem (who at times takes on a resemblance to those it encounters) and this sense of labyrinthine interconnection lends the novel the surreal, hallucinatory air that something's not quite right even during the most lucid moments. The Golem is a strange dream.

Although at times the novel seems mired or perhaps slightly befogged in an odd mix of mysticism (according to the potted timeline of Meyrink's life included in the introduction, from 1893 to 1896 he investigated "Cabalism, freemasonry, yoga, alchemy and hashish") it is the meat of the story - the plots and counterplots hatched between the ghetto's inhabitants, Pernath's increasing delirium, and the way in which the cramped little enclave itself and the people within it are so vividly characterised - that maintains interest after the decidedly odd atmosphere has hooked it. Further to this, although I did at times find the alchemical content a little tiring (e.g. long sections on the concept of the fusion of male and female to create a perfect being) it reminded me slightly of similar content in Moorcock's The City of the Autumn Stars, another text that visits a Prague similar but quite different to the one of material reality. I also thought that I detected some reverse-echoes of Michael Cisco's The Divinity Student and, appropriately enough, The Golem in Meyrink's novel although at this point it's difficult to place exactly where. It's undoubtebly an influential text, if a relatively and undeservedly obscure one and I'm glad to have read it.