CODEX ORFÉO

Fiction
Wild child, gentle wisent

Codex Orféo: A Novel
By Michael Charles Tobias
242 pp. Springer

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

This is a thriller about geo-terrorism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust as it reverberates decades later, and grasping global pharmaceutical syndicates. The more interesting subplot involves the intriguing biology of Belarus, including a hundred species of bees, bracket fungi (a new darling in the fight against cancer), six-hundred-year-old oak trees, red squirrels and the beloved, ancient wisent, or European wood bison.  However, there were also ticks that could crawl undetected up one’s anus and deliver the universally fatal encephalitis that had in recent years increased four-fold in prevalence.

The form of the novel is most unusual. It consists of ninety short chapters, one only three sentences long. The author uses this technique to “propel the reader into a continuous zone of the unexpected.”  It also includes thirteen high-quality photos by the author that enrich the aura of the book immensely.

The story begins as UCLA Professor David X. Lev goes to Rio de Janeiro to deliver a talk at a conference on Sustainable Growth. Interrupted by a tomahawk thrown at the screen, it ends in Café Wallace (not named for the famous Alfred Russell Wallace) with a shooting and a bombing apparently aimed at Professor Lev. From then on Lev is bugged, spied upon, and shadowed.

Eventually he goes to Belarus during the storm of the century, with twelve feet of snowfall as he searches of his younger brother, Simon, who is “a wild child” living amongst a herd of gentle wisent.

Once Lev is deep in the winter of the national forest, Tobias writes: “But for now, desperation was the only modus operandi. And David Lev, for all of his years in the wild, his exasperating emphasis on precision, and Latin, Greek, ornithology, quantum mechanics, the end of the world, the beginning of the world, world-population, the coming of climate catastrophe, extinction upon extinction…the Rio Codex (as he had described the insoluble chaos to his wife, Sasha) etc.,etc.—for all that, he was cold and tired and felt like an absolute novice at life.”

All this had nearly struck down his Belarusian colleague, who saw the unfoldings and rapidity of life going down, going away, forever, as if in slow motion, the entire beginning and end of human history in the personage of his companion, David Lev.

…There was Lev’s brother, fronting full independence. Beside him, an entire tribe of critically endangered wisents. A multi-generational intimacy, trans-species acceptance, preeminent mammalian nurturance he could not have believed, no matter how many Ph.D.’s in sociology, taxonomy, evolution, anthrozoology, anthropology…Lev was lost, like the day he was born.

Music throughout the book by Bach, Elgar, Brahms, Strauss Beethoven, Chopin, Gluck and especially Monteverdi (who wrote the very first opera – Orféo) serves as a link between men and animals. As Tobias says, “A music of the spheres, here on earth, has the power to keep us going in spite of everything.”

One small complaint, since our hero was eighty-four, we had to hear excessive references to his chest pain, medicines, and panic attacks. True, he did survive two plane crashes, an avalanche, and descent down a 120-foot cliff to escape a mother brown bear. I found myself wishing he had been seventy-four.

Nevertheless, when David finally gazes upon his brother, Simon shouts in Yiddish, “Gyyn ‘akk’q! Laz mir aleyn!”  David takes this to mean, “To leave!  To get out!” And despite all the sacrifice Dr. Lev has made to get there, he turns and departs.

In his novel Tobias connects the Holocaust, the Anthropocene, and the Sixth Extinction Spasm. It is an exciting read about cloak and dagger, greed and merciless killing, but also a cautionary tale about “a reckless species out of control on a fragile planet.” This is a crackerjack of a read. You will learn a lot about zoology, population extinction, Belarus, wilderness survival, and the love of family.

~