Boven is het stil (‘Above, it is quiet’) is the Dutch title of Gerbrand Bakker’s first novel. It appeared in English, translated by David Colmer, as The Twin. If the original title suggests an idyll, the reader is soon disabused of this impression. The novel’s quiet places are sites of trauma: a son rages against his father; a twin grieves the loss of his identical brother. In Bakker’s second novel, De omweg, published in English as The Detour, a woman leaves her past behind and hunkers down in secret among the hills and pastures of North Wales. Each novel is replete with doubles, dark riddles and code-like names.

Readers of Bakker’s new novel, The Hairdresser’s Son, will find themselves in similar territory. The novel unfolds in and around an Amsterdam barber’s shop, Chez Jean, which functions as a hall of mirrors. The proprietor, Simon, is a third-generation barber, gay, single and eremitical. He is in his mid-forties but seems far younger. He has inherited Chez Jean from his grandfather Jan, now in his late eighties. Almost nothing is known about his father, Cornelis, except that he too was a barber and that, in March 1977, when Simon’s mother revealed her pregnancy, he cleared off. He was a passenger on KLM flight 4805, which crashed into a Pan Am plane in Tenerife. Everyone on the Dutch plane perished, bodies going unidentified. Cornelis was presumed dead. 

Like the main characters in The Twin and The Detour, Simon has come to a standstill in life. He doesn’t even do much hair-cutting, as his mother, in a salvo of scolding, points out: the shop is more often closed than open. His heart is also closed. Simon lives