Although the incongruity of the pairing startles, Mendel's Dwarf is an achingly beautiful love story.. It is also an account of scientific progress, of the strides made in the field of genetic research. And, it is poignant reminder of the paucity of our understanding regarding the human heart.
Dr. Benedict Lambert, Ben, a distinguished geneticist, is the great-great-great-nephew of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar whose research in the inheritance characters in plants and hybridization provided the platform for modern genetics. Ironically, Ben has achondroplasia - he is a dwarf, a mutant as he calls himself, who "possesses a massive forehead and blunt, puglike features. His nose is stove in at the bridge, his mouth and jaw protrude. His limbs are squat and bowed, his fingers are mere squabs. He is one meter, twenty-seven centimeters tall."
Yet he is brilliant, so esteemed that he is called upon to address members of the Mendel Symposium some 100 years after his great-great-great uncle's death. Aware of the surprise, revulsion and pity in the eyes of his audience, he has steeled himself to ignore the "there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I sort of stare," yet he is cagey enough to use their sympathy, "the guilt of the survivor," to win over his listeners.
Following his address Ben visits the monastery at Brno where Mendel worked. It is here that their life stories begin to interweave. Through Ben's voice we learn that they share a devotion to research, while each is hampered in his own way - the eccentric friar by his humble background and the parameters imposed by the Augustinian order he follows, while Ben is fettered by his physical deformity.
As men they are both frustrated sexually. Mendel, bound by vows of celibacy, finds his muse in the safely wed Frau Rotwang, wife of a wealthy cotton mill owner, to whom the friar shyly presents a plant he has bred and named for her - the Adelaide fuchsia. His gift is received with "A small exhalation of breath. A shock. It is the first time that he has ever hinted at her Christian name, the first indication that he even knows it."
Ben's desire for intimacy is hobbled by his physical appearance. He finds a modicum of comfort and dismissive acceptance with prostitutes: "It'll be extra for you. Sorry dear, but that's the way it is. Market forces....extra for gross deformities." The pain of that encounter is small compared with his unrequited love for Miss Jean Piercey, a librarian at London's Royal Institute for Genetics, where Ben is on staff, determinedly working to identify the gene for achondroplasia. Only a writer with the compassion and skill of Simon Mawer could elicit empathy rather than sideshow curiosity when describing their unlikely coupling.
As the pair of biographies unfolds, the men's scientific discoveries are meticulously recounted. Although delivered clearly and succinctly, at times the complexities of such information as "You follow the riflips with radioactive DNA probes," may tend to intimidate. Yet, Mendel's Dwarf is an aurora borealis of ideas, a spectacular exploration of nature's cruelty, humankind's demand for conformity, the unremitting search for knowledge, and our unquenchable thirst for love.
Despite the lucidity of his prose and the ingeniousness of his tale, Mr. Mawer's crowning achievement surely is Ben, who tries to hide his vulnerability behind an armor of paradox. Raised by a father who never looked straight at him, "Always his glance was aslant, tangential, as though that way he might not notice," Ben develops his own way of coping: "You guard against self-pity, build bastions of cynicism, dig ditches of irony and sarcasm; but sometimes, just sometimes, the barriers are breached." In the breaching of these barriers the story reaches its cosmically tragic finale.
Winner of the United Kingdom's distinguished McKitterick Prize for fiction, Mr. Mawer is introduced to an American audience with Mendel's Dwarf. It is an auspicious, deeply affecting debut.
