The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk review – hallucinogenic horrors

In Amundsen, a short story by Alice Munro, a young woman comes to teach at a sanatorium during the second world war. Asked by a doctor what she knows about tuberculosis (TB), she tells him she has read The Magic Mountain. Like the Alpine peak above Davos on which it takes place, Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel casts its vast shadow over any fictional work about illness, let alone those set in TB clinics.

The Empusium, which the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has called her “retelling” of The Magic Mountain, takes place in the Silesian settlement of Görbersdorf, the real-life model for the sanatorium at Davos. Like Mann’s “simple young fellow” Hans Castorp, Mieczysław Wojnicz is also apparently unremarkable, a 24-year-old sanitation engineer who arrives at Görbersdorf with a mild case of TB. But there are hints too of a more troubling, undefined medical condition that has persisted throughout his life.

While Hans Castorp arrives in Davos for a three-week holiday and stays seven years, Mieczysław’s visit to Görbersdorf is concise (perhaps, having already written a mega-novel of her own in The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk felt no need to compete with Mann on size). But The Empusium, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, incorporates many details familiar from The Magic Mountain, from its playfully intrusive narrator to vivid descriptions of food (the consumptive diet was rich and substantial), homoeroticism (both novels include Freudian schoolboy memories involving the fondling of pencils), two characters who engage in never-ending intellectual arguments, and a foreboding sense of European culture standing on the threshold of the slaughterhouse of the first world war.

As the story progresses, however, it feels less like a retelling of The Magic Mountain and more its own strange animal. Appropriately enough for a book in which psychedelic mushrooms crowd the forest floors, waiting to become the main ingredient of the local liqueur that stands on every table, The Empusium is very much on its own trip. Its subtitle is A Health Resort Horror Story, and Tokarczuk makes entertaining use of familiar ingredients: mysterious crones, menacing yokels, strange behaviour at Mieczysław’s guesthouse, inexplicable noises from the attic, and the creeping realisation that not everyone at the sanatorium is dying of their disease.

A local tale claims that insane women haunt the forests around Görbersdorf, sometimes tearing men to pieces. This gives the book its title, the empousa being demons from Greek myth who took female form and fed on young men (in The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp has a vision of an idyllic Mediterranean society, but at its heart discovers a temple where two witches dismember and eat a baby). Mieczysław’s fellow lodgers, the humanist August August and the Catholic conservative Longin Lukas – counterparts to The Magic Mountain’s Settembrini and Naphta – are always at loggerheads, but find accord when it comes, as it repeatedly does, to the dishonesty and weakness of women. Their misogynistic views, an afterword explains, are lifted from works written by princes of the European intellect: Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Yeats and many more.

In a novel filled with striking images – a toad atop a mound of potatoes, a headless duck, sperm-squirting parasites that burst from the stomachs of fish – the most disturbing is that of the tuntschi, lifesize female puppets scattered throughout the forests surrounding Görbersdorf, fashioned by the charcoal burners who camp there. They are “made of moss, sticks, dry pine needles and rotten wood, overgrown with a fine lace of mushroom spawn. The head, quite deftly made spherical, had a face formed from a bracket fungus, with pine cones driven into it for eyes, and an opening drilled into its softer part for a mouth … The figure’s arms and legs were thrown to the sides, and between the legs – instantly attracting an onlooker’s attention – was a dark, narrow hole, a tunnel into the depths of this organic forest body.”

But if The Empusium trades in horror tropes, the book fails to provide the genre’s typical satisfactions, or even those of the well-made novel. There is a cursory feel to the way scenes begin and end, and details are fed to the reader in an odd, out-of-order way. Take, for example, Mister Jig, a fantastical man of Mieczysław’s invention whom he imagined seeing from train windows, throughout his childhood, on numerous journeys to visit medical specialists. Mister Jig leapt across the landscape, from treetops to fences and factory chimneys; if he made it all the way without touching the ground, the examination would be bearable. When Mister Jig is first mentioned – “He had trouble keeping his vision in one place – it kept escaping him, like Mister Jig in his train-journey game” – the phrasing suggests something we already know about. In fact, the explanation doesn’t arrive for another 70 pages.

Numerous other elements are similarly misarranged, giving the novel a haphazard quality. However, Tokarczuk leaves clues that this is not error but method. At one point Thilo, Mieczysław’s closest friend at the guesthouse, tries to communicate something important: “‘Don’t you have the feeling,’ asked Thilo, leaning so close to Wojnicz that his face almost touched his collar, ‘that we get everything in a muddle here? That we can’t remember what we said the day before, and what we ended on? Which side we took, who was our adversary and who our ally?’” Later in the book, for reasons I won’t spoil, a character exhorts Mieczysław – a little too didactically, perhaps – to reject simplistic divisions and accept the world as being made from “a multitude of very subtle shades. If anyone thinks the world is a set of stark opposites, he is sick.” Having The Empusium embody, on a structural level, this idea of reality as “blurred, out of focus, flickering, now like this, now like that” is a brave and interesting move. Speaking of Görbersdorf, Thilo tells Mieczysław that “one sinks into a strange state of mind here”. The same could be said of Tokarczuk’s novel, but as invitation rather than warning.

• The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply