The Empusium, the new novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, is subtitled ‘A Health Resort Horror Story’ and is described in the publicity material as revisiting the terrain of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But it is neither suspenseful nor frightening and has about as much to say about fin de siècle Europe as it does the Chinese Zhou dynasty. It may be set in a sanatorium before the First World War and its main character may be a young civil engineer, but here all points of convergence end. Far from composing a symphony of ideas in the grand Mann manner, Tokarczuk mixes feminist parable with folklorish ghost story in a way that never achieves narrative coherence.

The Empusium is centred on the experiences of Mieczyś Wojnicz, an unremarkable student of hydroengineering from Lwów who has come to Göbersdorf seeking treatment for tuberculosis. Slender and sensitive, he is the son of an oppressive father who believes that ‘blame for both national disasters and educational failures’ lies with ‘a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness, mawkishness and passivity’ and who insists on the virtues of ‘manliness, energy, social work for the public good, rationalism, pragmatism’. Wojnicz’s mother died in childbirth, yet he retains fond if blurry memories of his nanny, Gliceria: ‘He used to fantasize that if he could work out how to smooth all of Gliceria … to tighten up her outer form, maybe he would succeed in saving his nanny from old age.’

It quickly dawns on the reader that Wojnicz has been sent to Göbersdorf not merely to cure his tuberculosis but also to rid him of those ‘feminine’ emotions his father so abhors. Wojnicz senior hopes that life in an environment that prizes order, routine and punctuality above all else will