Splinter Chabot’s second novel if Heaven has enough space is the story of the long journey between the two best friends Elias and Magnus. Magnus determines the route, Elias follows and tells. The journey takes you past archetypal places (Het Dorp, Het Klooster, De Stad, Het Woud) and there the two celebrate life to the fullest.
But the destination of the journey, De Berg, is anything but cheerful. Magnus is plagued by demons. He is ‘trapped in his own head’. He does not want medication (‘those pills that numbed him in his eyes and put him to sleep’). He chooses a much more radical solution, which will set him free forever. That is why he wants to go to De Berg. Elias manfully tries to relate to his comrade’s rock-solid resolve, going far beyond what he ever thought possible. Everything for friendship, everything for freedom.
Elias and Magnus are sweethearts (and that’s what they call each other all the time: Liefie, with a capital letter). They want the best for each other and for the world, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But are they interesting enough to keep you glued to the story of their journey for nearly six hundred pages? That is quite disappointing.
Magnus’ dark side hardly comes out and that hurts in the long run. Elias repeatedly makes it clear that he can’t get to Magnus’s innermost thoughts, but we’ll know that at some point. What we hardly know anything about is his background. A father who has lost him, that’s about it. Speculation about his friend’s souls isn’t Elias’ priority either. Magnus remains a mystery, but a mystery that becomes more and more flat.
Alliterate garishly
Elias doesn’t dig into his own soul either. He prefers to exhaust himself in exuberant descriptions and in debiting wise lessons and opinions. There is of course nothing wrong with that in itself, were it not for the fact that Chabot with his unmistakable language talent always flies out of the way. The writer gives word combinations such as ‘mouse secretly’, ‘ping-pong fast’, ‘lame-weak’, ‘twig-breakable’, ‘newspaper wrinkled’, ‘ceremonially priestly’, ‘cave-reverberating’ and ‘compass-small’, but he does so so often that the language discovers language tricks. especially in the showy alliterative cases. Chabot uses too many words anyway and that is at the expense of the expressiveness of his story. A simple example: ‘She was wearing a black trouser suit – and I immediately noticed that for the first time she wasn’t wearing a dress. For the first time she was dressless (…).’
Gul is Chabot with imagery, to the point of neuroticism. At a certain point you crave passages without comparisons and metaphors, all the more so because they are not always correct (‘the once again Moses-like crowd’) or unconvincing (‘His skin was loosely around his body. Like paint in an old house slowly leaves the walls.”). Phrases such as ‘He was (…) a carnivore without tearing things up’ also rattle.
Wise insights
Then the wise insights with which the travel story is paved. “The church as an institution had so often made people suffer unnecessarily and undeservedly,” we learn, for example. And: ‘Many people always want to know how something works, so that they forget to enjoy it.’ There may also be this one: ‘Actually (…) taking away the fantasy is the greatest theft of which mankind is guilty.’ And it could also be more beautiful, more poetic: ‘beaten paths never produce new flowers. The feet are stamping.’
In Het Dorp, the first stop of their journey, Elias and Magnus meet De Schrijver, in whom it is not difficult to recognize Gerard Reve. Thanks to Magnus, Elias acquires De Schrijver’s pen. But that doesn’t save him. It would have taken more to if Heaven has enough space make a good novel.
Splinter Chabot: If Heaven has enough space. Stage; 570 pages; €22.50.
