The Discovery of Heaven.

The overarching plot of this big, sprawling novel by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch (The Assault) is revealed to the reader in a prologue and, scattered at intervals throughout the book, five dialogues between two wisecracking angels. The junior angel is reporting to a superior (you know he's superior because he talks - sometimes at length - in italics; very annoying) who in turn will keep "the Chief" posted. Given the characters, it seems fair to assume that these dialogues take place in heaven, a big bureaucracy in the sky, with "departments," a hierarchy of angels who advise each other to "delegate more," and a Chief who acts out of his "unfathomable wisdom, which may sometimes surprise even himself." As the dialogue creaks along like a mechanical model in a Grade B dinosaur movie, the reader is introduced to the assignment these angels are carrying out.

God has concluded that, by unraveling the genetic code, humans have discovered the secret of creation, thereby betraying his covenant with them. To end the covenant officially, the original tablets of the Ten Commandments must be found and returned to heaven. The angels' task is to create a person equipped to carry out this extraordinary mission and to make sure that the circumstances of his life allow him to succeed.

Quinten, the angel/child to whom the mission is entrusted, is the offspring of some remarkable characters whose backgrounds, gifts, adventures, and, above all, conversations about friendship, loyalty, love and desire, history, art, science, technology, religion, fate, and good and evil form the substance of the 700 pages of the novel that take place on earth. Since Quinten isn't born until page 344, we have plenty of time to get to know his two possible fathers, the only real characters in the book. They are partners in a friendship that encompasses all the excitement of discovery, true intellectual companionship with just enough competitiveness to give it a little edge, easy intimacy, humor, and fun, all so beautifully and vividly portrayed the reader is envious. Onno Quist, son of one of Holland's leading establishment families, is a big sloppy lawyer-turned-philologist whose linguistic gifts won him early recognition and who is devoting his life to deciphering the so-called Phaistos disc, one of the few remaining unsolved hieroglyphic fragments. Max Delius is an astronomer and an enthusiastic womanizer whose father, a collaborator with the Germans during World War II, sent his Jewish mother off to a concentration camp. Onno and Max have each heard of the other's father; they compare notes until they conclude that they were both conceived on the same day in 1933.

For the first few months of their friendship they are so completely satisfied with each other's company and conversation that their work, their other friends, and their lovers fall into the background. But when Max becomes involved with Ada, a beautiful cellist, the balance changes and for a time they become a threesome. The balance changes again, Ada moves in with Onno, and, when she discovers she is pregnant, they marry. Onno remains unaware that Max might be the father of her child. And as the result of a car accident when she is six months pregnant, Ada lapses into an irreversible coma.

As the angels have told us, these characters and events are but preparations for the advent of Quinten, who turns out to be principally a vehicle for the action, and more a concept than a character. He is an uncommonly beautiful, self-possessed, and oddly detached child who is brought up by Ada's mother and Max in a castle that has been converted into apartments occupied by a very heterogeneous group of people. Although he goes to the local school, Quinten is actually educated by his neighbors who impart knowledge and skills as widely diverse as art history and picking locks that will enable him eventually to carry out his mission. One of them has an extensive collection of architectural picture books that fascinate Quinten, who, at age ten, has had a "nurturing architectural dream...the universe transformed into a single architectural complex, without beginning or end. Nowhere is there a living thing to be seen....[and a] fortified door with the padlock on it at 'the center of the world.'" For the next six years and without knowing why, Quinten studies the books in an effort to find his building, which he has named "The Citadel." He finds shadows, similarities, clues in buildings of antiquity and the Renaissance and in drawings of the architectural fantasies of Piranesi, but never his building, clearly an image of heaven.

Just before his seventeenth birthday, Quinten sets forth on a quest for the tablets that leads him away from Holland and gives the author a chance to treat readers to the second great reward of this novel: his enchanting, exciting, and exquisitely accurate descriptions of Venice, Rome, and Jerusalem. With the help of Onno's expertise in ancient languages and archaeology, and in a suspenseful and exciting denouement, Quinten's mission is accomplished.

Mulisch has undertaken to portray in this novel a sweeping, panoramic view of this world, ancient and modern, scientific and artistic, with consideration of many of the big philosophical issues of our time and an examination of human capacities for good and evil ranging through friendship, love, and the horrors of the Holocaust. He has also chosen to present several images of heaven. In addition to those described above, we see a heaven that is a waste-land of abstraction, where "figures take shape and disappear, triangles, circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, spheres, cones, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, where tumbling spheroids glow and merge in the endless harmony of the Endless Light." No angels listen to Mozart in this heaven, nor God to Bach. There is no redeemer here. In the end, the question remains: Why would anyone familiar with Mulisch's rich, complex, juicy, variegated, pulsing earth have the slightest interest in his bleak and bureaucratic heaven?

Molly Finn is a free-lance writer. She lives in New York City.