It Came From The Middle Ages!

Sometimes, when you’re summarizing a book you’re reading for someone else, it makes you wonder why, exactly, you are reading it. “Well,” I heard myself say recently, “it’s about a bunch of aliens who crash-land in fourteenth-century Germany during the Black Plague and make friends with a priest...” The person I was talking to wore a carefully polite look on her face, pretending that the novel I was describing didn’t sound like a reject from a freshman writing workshop. “It’s better than it sounds,” I protested feebly, which is true – not that that’s saying all that much, honestly. And so we have Eifelheim.

The story is actually split into two narratives, one wholly unnecessary – I’ll let you guess which is which. In the present, two irritating scientists, Sharon and Tom, lounge around in their apartment thinking of Great Matters and getting on each other’s (and our) nerves. Tom is trying to figure out why one particular village in the Black Forest, called Oberhochwald, was never resettled after the Black Death, and was in fact renamed “Eifelheim,” while Sharon is using theoretical physics to explore the nature of time. Their areas of research, apparently unrelated, slowly but surely begin to converge in a most unexpected way. The second narrative takes place in 1348, in Oberhochwald, where a terrifying electrical storm – initially interpreted by the superstitious peasants as the apocalypse – proves to be the crash-landing of a shipful of grayish-green aliens who resemble giant grasshoppers. Father Dietrich, a local priest with a curious intellect, masters his revulsion and makes contact with the aliens, offering them food and medicine; with the help of translating headsets, the two species are able to communicate, sort of. The “Krenken,” as Dietrich names them, are trying to repair their ship and return home, but lack the necessary equipment. Dietrich is more interested in saving their souls by converting them to Christianity. With some difficulty, the two species negotiate an uneasy peace, but when word gets out of the village about the “demons” who live there, time runs short for the weakened and sick Krenken. Can they fix their ship and leave Earth before an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob – or the plague sweeping Europe – catches up to them?

Okay, you probably guessed that I’m not a fan of the present-day storyline. Awkwardly wedged into the real story (and, it turns out, a recycled old novella that the author apparently couldn’t bear to let go), this framing device is jarringly different in tone from the Eifelheim plot. Not much happens with the bickering scientists, but it doesn’t stop the omniscient narrator from an endless stream of smugly knowing asides and analyses of every inflection and turn of phrase. By contrast, the Eifelheim narrative is much more restrained; the events and characters it describes are remarkable enough to require no flourishes from a self-congratulatory narrator. This isn’t to say that any of the writing is stellar; it’s often slow and plodding, without much style or elegance, and can be very dry when it’s not completely straining credulity (Father Dietrich has an uncanny knack for singlehandedly inventing terms like “electronic” and “microphone” from the Greek). In addition, the author has added some unnecessary show-offy touches to dialogue, supposedly reflecting the German dialect. For example, the German for “it is” translates literally as “it gives,” so when a character means, say, “It is hot outside,” the author writes instead, “There gives heat outside.” Ever wonder what happened to that geek in German class who wrote fussy little essays on grammar while you were passing notes? Now you know.

It’s too bad there’s so much excess flab on this story, because the Eifelheim plot is both interesting and original, if you’re willing to suspend disbelief over the basic premise. Father Dietrich is an interesting character: progressive for his time, but still very much a medieval mind, bound by the tenets of Christianity and the severely limited scientific knowledge then available. Several of the Krenken become well-developed characters too, intriguing in their near-humanity; in some respects they seem astonishingly human, but a casually dropped phrase can instantly reveal their chilling dissimilarity. It’s obvious that there won’t be a happy interspecies ending, but the slowly intertwining fates of humans and Krenken is both inevitable and difficult to watch.

Ambitious and inventive, but not nearly as entertaining or streamlined as it should have been, Eifelheim is both captivating and frustrating, because you’ll want it to be better than it is. Nevertheless, the author deserves points for the original premise and densely developed setting and characters. Perhaps in the future, he’ll team up with another writer who can breathe some much-needed life into his prose. In the meantime, get ready to explain with a straight face why you’re reading a book about alien grasshoppers crash-landing in fourteenth-century Germany and making friends with a priest.