The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Swordfish by Hugo Claus
Frank Kooistra

Hugo Claus. The Swordfish. Peter Owen, 1997. 104 pp. £14.95.

This novella by Hugo Claus, Belgium’s most famous contemporary writer, partly accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to show the creating and destroying power of an iconoclastic Christ in a rural Belgian town where religious zeal barely exists. Martin, the young son of Sibylle Verhegge, the divorced wife of a manufacturer, learns about the crucifixion from a dying music teacher who wants to convert one impressionable soul before she dies. She teaches Martin about Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in secret; then Martin does what mature Christians often do, which is to imitate the crucifixion by carrying a wooden cross, which an ex-abortionist turned drunken handyman, Richard Robion, has made for him out of scrap wood.
The interesting side of the novel is that Martin’s obsession with Christ precipitates change (secular changes to be sure) in the lives of Martin’s mother, the handyman Richard, and Headmaster Goosens, who is Martin’s teacher at the local school. Sibylle and Goosens begin an affair, which will be a short-term antidote to the boredom and frustration in their own lives. Richard Robion, the handyman, undergoes a more drastic change, beating to death Julia, his alcoholic wife, who has followed her lover into alcoholism to keep him company in his disgrace. He takes out all the anger of their sexually dysfunctional relationship on her, beating her to death the same day. Julia becomes the Christlike sacrificial figure in the novel, who bleeds like Christ on the cross. The novel ends with a description of her death. Richard is talking with the police inspector, who is interrogating him: (“ ‘But when you fell unconscious, before that I mean, was she still alive?) “Of course she was still alive! (‘was she bleeding?’) Of course she was bleeding!’ ” Martin cannot (nor does he try to) convert the skeptical adults his obsession brushes against briefly, but the changes he affects in their lives go far beyond the ordinary events of one day. A Christlike and sacrificial death occurs in an unlikely place, which is both threatening and astonishing, but in the spirit of the crucified and risen Christ. [Frank Kooistra]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Swordfish by Hugo Claus Frank Kooistra Hugo Claus. The Swordfish. Peter Owen, 1997. 104 pp. £14.95. This novella by Hugo Claus, Belgium’s most famous contemporary writer, partly accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to show the creating and destroying power of an iconoclastic Christ in a rural Belgian town where religious zeal barely exists. Martin, the young son of Sibylle Verhegge, the divorced wife of a manufacturer, learns about the crucifixion from a dying music teacher who wants to convert one impressionable soul before she dies. She teaches Martin about Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in secret; then Martin does what mature Christians often do, which is to imitate the crucifixion by carrying a wooden cross, which an ex-abortionist turned drunken handyman, Richard Robion, has made for him out of scrap wood. The interesting side of the novel is that Martin’s obsession with Christ precipitates change (secular changes to be sure) in the lives of Martin’s mother, the handyman Richard, and Headmaster Goosens, who is Martin’s teacher at the local school. Sibylle and Goosens begin an affair, which will be a short-term antidote to the boredom and frustration in their own lives. Richard Robion, the handyman, undergoes a more drastic change, beating to death Julia, his alcoholic wife, who has followed her lover into alcoholism to keep him company in his disgrace. He takes out all the anger of their sexually dysfunctional relationship on her, beating her to death the same day. Julia becomes the Christlike sacrificial figure in the novel, who bleeds like Christ on the cross. The novel ends with a description of her death. Richard is talking with the police inspector, who is interrogating him: (“ ‘But when you fell unconscious, before that I mean, was she still alive?) “Of course she was still alive! (‘was she bleeding?’) Of course she was bleeding!’ ” Martin cannot (nor does he try to) convert the skeptical adults his obsession brushes against briefly, but the changes he affects in their lives go far beyond the ordinary events of one day. A Christlike and sacrificial death occurs in an unlikely place, which is both threatening and astonishing, but in the spirit of the crucified and risen Christ. [Frank Kooistra]

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