Magical realism, slipstream, science fiction, alchemic literature – Congo Tango, Paavo Matsin’s fifth and thickest novel to date, has earned those epithets and many more. On the one hand, the plot is simple: the Tower of London’s ravens disappear and the search for them stirs up deep wells of trouble. On the other hand, Congo Tango is composed of numerous layers and secondary plots which whisk the reader away to Cairo, London, Prague, Budapest, and Brussels.
The novel tells of an old Europe – one that tends to be forgotten. In it, we encounter individuals, objects, patterns of behavior, and attitudes which, if they have not petered out of existence already, have become highly eccentric. Obviously, this is deliberate. Fine hats and the fine differences between them in central London, old Jewish men debating the nature of God in a Prague café, and a composer’s apartment museum in that same city which is open for only a few hours on Tuesdays and has walls painted almost entirely blue are just a few examples of Matsin’s host of European oddities. Once he adds Brussels’ Congolese community and the La Sape subculture (along with the music of Papa Wemba) which ties its members to their motherland, the cocktail is exquisite. The reader realizes that indeed, what Matsin is doing beneath the cloak of a quest for lost ravens and the activities of a bloodthirsty angel who has gone astray is something much greater. It concerns Europe as a whole. Matsin demonstrates that as Europeans, we are often blinded by the allure of distant cultures while failing to notice the exoticism of our own – be it alchemy (one of the author’s favorite subjects) or simply the thick, interwoven blanket of culture that binds the whole continent together. In addition, Matsin questions the tenacity of the connections between Western and Eastern Europe.
Every loose end is tied up neatly by the end of the novel – storylines that meanwhile unraveled are resolved, and the reader is left feeling quite mellow. Europe may be old and dusty, but the treasures that collected over the course of centuries still rest beneath that layer of grime. All it takes is a single blow for them to sparkle again.
