Written between 1986 and 1990, while the Internet was in its infancy, published in 1992, finalist for the Rossel Prize (the main Belgian literary prize), La Lumière de l'Archange was at the time a novel by slight anticipation, since it took place at the end of 1999.
Pierre Lhermitte, French specialist in viral diseases, Nobel Prize in medicine for the vaccine against AIDS, founder of a brotherhood of scientists, is the victim of the virus he is studying, a formidable mutant that has arisen in the Central African forests. Held in quarantine in his own department, supported by his friends around the world, he participates in the speed race between the epidemic and research, while becoming aware of a contemporary world from which he had until then abstracted himself and that is shaken by deep social or geopolitical upheavals, as well as the explosion of ultraviolent fanaticisms and the advent of millenarian movements in this last year of the twentieth century.
But strange psychic changes appear in the survivors. Is the development of life at a crossroads?
Pierre Lhermitte, sent to Africa to coordinate the fight against the epidemic in the hope of keeping him landlocked, will be involved simultaneously in an exceptional adventure and in an inner, psychological, metaphysical and spiritual quest.
A visionary novel, whose only flaw is that it was published too early. Now that the epidemics of mutant viruses (Ebola, Covid19) are succeeding and amplifying one another, it is extremely topical, and warns us of the dangers that the contemporary world – and our behavior – poses to a humanity rushing headlong towards the wall.
