Past Presence: a review of Miloš Urban's "The Seven Churches"

Past Presence: a review of Miloš Urban's 

"The Seven Churches- a Gothic novel of Prague"

Discharged from the Police after a botched job, K. is unexpectedly asked to rejoin the force and given a very specific assignment – that of accompanying and protecting Matthias Gmünd, an eccentric aristocrat who intends to restore the Gothic churches of Prague to their original glory. At first, K is in his element – after all, he is himself a failed historian obsessed with the Middle Ages and suspicious of the contemporary world. But his visits to Prague’s historic churches are increasingly accompanied by terrifying fits in which K has mysterious visions of the past. More worryingly, a serial killer is on the loose, seemingly targeting anybody who dares defy the sacred sites of the town.

Pieta' on Charles Bridge

Miloš Urban’s atmospheric 1999 Gothic novel The Seven Churches was a bestseller in Spain and the Czech Republic and has been translated into twelve languages. Hats off, then, to Peter Owen Publishers for securing the publication of Robert Russell’s English translation. Indeed, I am rather surprised that it has not enjoyed the runaway success obtained by other, less-deserving novels. 

Urban has been compared to Umberto Eco but, frankly, that is the type of lazy analogy which nowadays tends to be applied to any literary thriller associated with the Middle Ages. The novel is reminiscent of Eco in its erudition and in its author’s evident love for literature and cultural history. However, the novel has supernatural undercurrents which are not particularly typical of the Italian author. The Seven Churches reminds me rather of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. There is a resemblance in the subject-matter (a serial killer obsessed with historical churches) and a similar concern with psycho-geography – the quasi-mystical idea that buildings can carry “memories” of ages past. In the novel we roam through a Prague in which the Middle Ages unexpectedly reassert themselves, in which chasms open up in the road swallowing cars into medieval crypts; in which unicorns appear on dissecting tables and buxom beauties wear chastity belts; in which centuries-old secret societies live on, hidden from the hustle and bustle of the modern world.

At one point, K. is drawn into a literary discussion about Gothic novels – he tends to prefer supernatural Gothic to the rational strand of the genre in which all puzzling occurrences are tidily explained at the end. In Urban’s book, there seems to be a struggle between the two types of Gothic. Some mysteries are solved – other questions remain tantalizingly unanswered. In fact, the novel just gets weirder with each chapter. The ambiguous ending is somewhat unsatisfying from a narrative point of view. However, one cannot help feeling that it fits this haunting, uncanny novel like a glove.

A sunnier view of Prague