Hi, everyone!
Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for THE SHADOW OF THE MOLE by Bob Van Laerhoven on this Black Coffee Book Tour.
Below you will find an about the book section, my book review, an excerpt from the book, an about the author section and the author’s social media links. Enjoy!
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About the Book
1916, Bois de Bolante, France. The battles in the trenches are raging fiercer than ever. In a deserted mineshaft, French sappeurs discover an unconscious man, and nickname him The Mole.
Claiming he has lost his memory, The Mole is convinced that he’s dead, and that an Other has taken his place. The military brass considers him a deserter, but front physician and psychiatrist-in-training Michel Denis suspects that his patient’s odd behavior is stemming from shellshock, and tries to save him from the firing squad.
The mystery deepens when The Mole begins to write a story in écriture automatique that takes place in Vienna, with Dr. Josef Breuer, Freud’s teacher, in the leading role. Traumatized by the recent loss of an arm, Denis becomes obsessed with him, and is prepared to do everything he can to unravel the patient’s secret.
Set against the staggering backdrop of the First World War, The Shadow Of The Mole is a thrilling tableau of loss, frustration, anger, madness, secrets and budding love. The most urgent question in this extraordinary story is: when, how, and why reality shifts into delusion?
The Shadow of the Mole
By Bob Van Laerhoven
- Genre: Literary fiction; historical fiction
- Print length: 422 pages
- Age range: This is an adult book
- Trigger warnings: Realistic wartime violence and death
- Goodreads Rating: 4.5 *
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My Book Review
RATING: 4 out of 5 Stars
THE SHADOW OF THE MOLE by Bob Van Laerhoven is a dark and intriguing historical fiction/mystery set in France during WWI featuring a man found with amnesia and the young psychiatrist who wants to uncover his identity.
As the French tunnel beneath the German lines in the Argonne during WWI, a group of diggers discover an unconscious man in a connecting abandoned mining shaft. He is taken to the hospital at the front and when he wakes up, he claims he has no memory. The staff refer to him as “The Mole”.
Michel Denis is a young psychiatrist who volunteered to work at the front and in an explosion loses his arm. He continues to help as much as possible and he becomes intrigued with the man brought in from the tunnel called The Mole. He is determined to uncover his identity and discover how he ended up in the tunnel. The Mole asks for paper and pen and writes his story, but what is the truth?
This story is an intriguing look at the psychological impact of war on the psyche. Everyone in this story deal with the horrors of war but continue to have a grain of hope for the future. I feel this is more literary fiction with the continual psychiatric analysis of The Mole, his writing, and Michel’s thoughts on the self. That is not a negative criticism, just a heads up to readers who are looking for more of a genre style historical mystery. The settings are descriptive and the emotions palpable in both the story as told by Michel in present day and The Mole’s writing of his life. An interesting read.
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Excerpt
Part I
Prologue
’ ’, they murmured, with their heads bowed, a prayer to La Sainte Vierge1. Their voices were soft and solemn, like when they were chil‐ dren. In the shadows, their lanterns sparked the dust into a golden mist, as they hacked their way into the earth.
Jean Dumoulin used to hum softly but melodically during his work in the tunnels. His fellow diggers had nicknamed him ‘the canary’. Of late, he had taken to murmuring the bawdiest beer hall songs he knew, for the frankly insane reason that his regiment, the 13th French Infantry, had received the audacious orders to dig tunnels under the German tunnels at the spot that everybody in the Argonne-region called Fille Morte2.
That day, February 26, 1916, Jean Dumoulin had turned to inventing his own songs. Faced with the threat of German tunnels above him, he sang only in his mind. Dumoulin liked to surprise himself with whatever words came to him. The words made him feel different: not a twenty-six-year-old French soldier clawing away in near darkness, but more like a classic Greek poet, posing with a lyre on a mountain top overlooking a shimmering sea.
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Dumoulin was crooning Ma bouche sera un enfer de douceur/tu crias ton armée de douleur3, while he used his pick-axe to clear the rubble around the entrance of an old mine gallery they had discovered. He pondered which verse would come next: ton amour armé or ton amour blindé?4
It was then he saw the body lying in the gallery. From time to time, when they were grubbing in the earth, a shovel would uncover a half-buried body. They couldn’t always tell if the stiff was German or French. Often, all that was left was a rotten lump of meat. In spite of the stench and their revulsion, the sappers would try to identify it. Who else would do so? They thought of all the missing men and their anxious relatives and loved ones and they searched the body for anything that could lead to its identification.
“Nom de Dieu,” Dumoulin hissed over his shoulder to his companion Guillaume. “Another stiff. Hope this one doesn’t break in half like the other one.” Neither had actually seen the mummified corpse of a miner, perished years ago in the coal mines, who was said to have cracked in half when tunnel diggers brought it to the surface, but the story was legendary and if you denied it, you were just a cynic.
Cursing under his breath, Jean moved forward. When his hands touched the body, he jerked away as though someone had stabbed him.
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Chapter One
So softly treads the night.
Standing behind my right shoulder. No breath reaches my skin.
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Chapter Two
‘ ‘, at the horizon. The Meurisson Valley, home to the field hospital which served the whole region, lay in Bois de Bolante, a low-lying part of the great Argonne woods. Dr Michel Denis walked there through the trenches. The recovery area was crudely constructed – a semi-underground complex harboring medical provisions, ammunition and food storage, bathhouses and a sickbay. Like everyone else who worked there, Denis was curious about the infamous ‘Mole’, and he wanted a closer look. The sappers digging tunnels under the German lines had found the unconscious man, dressed in civvies, in the tunnel of an old charcoal burner. A day later, the man was still unconscious.
In the sickbay, Denis went to the patient’s bed and studied his facial features. Wide ears, a somewhat beaked nose and jowly cheeks, perhaps Semitic. Denis guessed The Mole’s age at about forty-five. Baggy blue skin under the eyes. As he made these observations, Denis came closer and now he stood at the bedside. Startled, he glanced at where his own right arm, severed by a piece of shrapnel, should have been. Involuntarily, he was reaching out with his phantom limb to touch the man’s left leg. All at once, a hail of shells
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The Shadow Of The Mole
passed over, as though the memory of that shrapnel had provoked the Germans at the north side of the Meurisson Valley. The shells drummed the basement walls with their deafening low thunder. Denis pictured the men in the icy trenches at the front, frantically seeking shelter. Since February 12th, after heavy snowfall, a light thaw had set in. It drenched the trenches with cold, gurgling mud, and inundated the mine corridors, used to infiltrate enemy territory, with melted ice: sluggish, foul-reeking, and copper-coloured.
An explosion shook the basement. Denis looked around him. Rumour had it that the Germans, being technically advanced, had electric lighting in their shelters. The French hospital had to make do with candle lanterns. As a result, bizarre shadows waved on the walls in a slow, undulating rhythm. No wonder the wounded called the hospital le pot de chambre de la France. At the moment, the chamber pot of France was a dazzling phantasmagoria of shapes chasing each other on the walls and the floor. Light and darkness played on The Mole’s face.
In the shadows, the man opened his eyes.
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About the Author
Bob van Laerhoven is a Belgian writer and traveller whose work has been translated into most European languages, as well as Russian and Chinese.
He made his debut as a novelist in 1985 with “Nachtspel – Night Game.” He quickly became known for his colorful, kaleidoscopic novels in which the fate of the individual is closely related to broad social transformations. His style slowly evolved in his later novels to embrace more personal themes while continuing to branch out into the world at large. International flair has become his trademark.
As a travel writer he has explored conflicts and trouble-spots across the globe from the early 1990s to 2004. Echoes of his experiences on the road also trickle through in his novels. During the Bosnian war, Van Laerhoven spent part of 1992 in the besieged city of Sarajevo. Three years later he was working for MSF – Doctors without frontiers – in the Bosnian city of Tuzla during the NATO bombings.
All these experiences contribute to Bob Van Laerhoven’s rich and commendable oeuvre, as the versatile author of novels, travel stories, theatre pieces, biographies, non-fiction, letters, columns, articles…
His work has received many accolades.
- The Hercule Poirot Prize for best crime-novel of the year with “De Wraak van Baudelaire – Baudelaire’s Revenge”
- Also for Baudelaire’s Revenge, the USA BEST BOOK AWARD 2014 in the category Fiction: mystery/suspense.
- “Dangerous Obsessions” was voted “best short story collection of 2015 in The San Diego Book Review.
- “Heart Fever” was one of the five finalists – and the only non-American author – of the Silver Falchion Award 2018 in the category “short stories collections.”
- “Return to Hiroshima”, was listed in the top ten of international crime novels in 2018 in the British quality review blog “MurderMayhem&More”
- “Alejandro’s Lie” was named the best political thriller of 2021 by BestThrillers.com
Social Media Links
Website: https://www.bobvanlaerhoven.be/en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bob.vanlaerhoven/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobvanlaerhoven
Purchase Link
http://mybook.to/ShadowOfTheMole
