Lowly’s Book Blog

Don’t believe the cover of this book. The cover and blurb certainly indicate a gothic horror. The media release calls it a gothic fairytale. But once you have moved past the first segment of the book it is very clear that this is actually a scifi set just a few years ago.

Doctor Victor Hoppe grew up in a small village near the border of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. After many years away working in research at a university in Bonn, he suddenly returns home with three children, identical triplets. He hires a retired kinder teacher to look after the boys while he works from home as a GP. The woman, Charlotte, grows to love the boys, but is taken from them suddenly. From there the narrative moves between exposition of Victor’s childhood and the origins of the three boys.

I have called this scifi, simply because there is a great deal of science content. As you might guess in the first few pages, the boys are all clones of the father, complete with the harelip that caused Victor’s mother to send him away. Once the explanations begin in section 2, the science starts getting fairly heavy. If you plan to make sense of this bit, make sure you brush up on your first year embryology first. And the technobabble is relentless right to the end.

In spite of that, I thought this was a very good book. It certainly raised a lot of ethical questions, one of the strengths of good scifi. The characters were nicely rounded, and stayed consistent right to the end, especially Victor. And yet, unusually for scifi, there is strong religious content. Some of it is blamed for Victor’s antisocial behavior, but at times religious faith offers him the only possible hope. I haven’t yet worked out why the three borders were so important to the story, but on a second reading that might become clear.

I certainly approve of any book that makes me think, and this one certainly does.