The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

“Maybe even God only exists from time to time,” the Chief Inspector added quietly. He had leaned forward, and with his face averted was listening attentively to what Gregory was spewing forth with such difficulty from deep inside himself.

“Maybe,” Gregory replied indifferently, “But the gaps in his existence are very wide, as you know.”

Inspector Gregory is called upon by Scotland Yard to investigate a strange series of crimes--corpses are disappearing from their caskets, only to be found a short ways away, the twist being that a few of them have been spotted in transit. In short, is this a case of prankish grave robbery, or are they something stranger and more destabilizing: a sort of resurrection?

The summary makes The Investigation sound like a horror story, or perhaps an existential detective novel in the vein of New York Trilogy or Death in Her Hands. And it is, in some ways, both of those things. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that, like in those two novels, the “crimes” such as they are, are never solved and the investigators undergo an identity crisis. Nor can it really be surprising that some parts are very creepy: a reel to reel recording of a witness dying as he spends his last breaths describing a writhing corpse; Gregory’s dream of his landlord as a puppet master who contacts the dead through his manipulation of a pair of mannequins; an interview with Sciss, a police statistician(?) that devolves into a strange psychosexual encounter complete with mysterious negative depicting snuff films.

Spoilers follow, to the extent that this can be spoiled.

The climax, no less unsettling for its predictability, sees Gregory, whose entire life has slowly been consumed by the case and its myriad unprovable causes--a psychopath, a virus, alien technology, God--given a plausible explanation by his chief, an explanation that posits a trucker who’s been slowly driven mad by driving through the foggy winter nights. He protests, he points out the facts that don’t fit the explanation, he protests about the arbitrary nature of it all; ultimately though, he accepts it, because to not do so would upset the constructions that allow Scotland Yard, religion, government, human relationships, et al, and the premise that lies behind it all: that there is some concrete meaning in the world, and that we can discover and  comprehend it. That actions can be explained, crimes solved, and corpses safely assumed to be dead.

And yet, the book as a whole is somewhat inert, consisting largely of long conversations between various detectives, officers, scientists, and doctors. Entire chapters pass with no real action, and many of the characters outside of Gregory, Sciss, and the Landlord blur together so that much of the book reads more like a philosophical dialogue than a novel. Outside of Gregory’s increasingly emotive responses (he’s always angry, confused, certain), his descent into obsession lacks the texture than makes New York Stories work so well, and the pathos Moshfegh gives the widow in Death in Her Hands. In spite of its compelling big ideas and exciting final quarter, I found this, my first Lem, to be underwhelming--but I’m still looking forward to reading more.