Michael Hall's Reviews > The Discovery of Heaven

No mere summary could cover the depths to be found within this novel. Trying to summarize it would not give justice to it's brilliance and complexity. It is not a book to be taken lightly as it requires time to be set aside for it. You will need to want to be challenged as well as entertained before beginning this book. At only 730 pages it still took me three weeks and some odd days to read. Not because it was slow and boring, but because it often distracted me enough to put the book down in order to go wander around thinking about something that arose from the dialogue within.

This is a beautiful tale of friendship and family delivered in the midst of ideas. Ideas of an epic scale. The discussions are everywhere: science, religion, politics, architecture, family, linguistics, art, music, and almost everything else that you will find in a full and rich life. There are many philosophical, as well as meta-physical, tangents that spring up in almost every conversation. Converstions that are intelligent, diverse, probing, witty, and often complicated. My only complaint is that at times I would feel that the main character, Onno, liked to talk just a little too much!


The overarching plot, that wraps around the story of our characters, deals with a conversation between two angels in which a subordinate, tasked with having the Ten Commandments returned to Heaven, is explaining his reasoning behind actions that result in certain coincidences that affects the fate of each character involved in order to lead up to the conclusion at the end. Human knowledge frightens and appalls the divine, and actually threatens their superiority -- so something must be done!


Kudos for Mulisch for writing such a masterpiece that is so much more than the usual literary fluff found on a bestseller list.