The Stone Council by Jean-Christophe Grange (Vintage)
Jean-Christophe Grange is a French mystery writer. His novel The Stone Council was published in English by Vintage and translated by Ian Monk. It is a mystery and a thriller and also involves telekinesis, hypnotism, clairvoyance and other elements of the paranormal. The book was also adapted into a feature-length film in 2006 and was a joint production between France, Germany, and Italy.
As a child, Diane Thiberge suffered a traumatic experience which made her adverse to being touched by anyone. She is a single woman who works as an ethnologist living in France. Her specialty is studying the habits of predatory animals. She is also an avid practitioner of martial arts.
Diane is fast approaching thirty and believes this may be the last chance for her to become a mother. “Turning thirty reminded her symbolically of one of her biggest secrets: never would she have a child. For the simple reason that she would never have a lover.” However, she was not giving up on becoming a mother.
Diane considers artificial insemination but this “meant doctors penetrating inside her with their cold, pointed, jagged instruments”. In her mind, “this would have been a sort of clinical rape.” She also thought about in vitro fertilization, but this still meant the doctors would have to invade her body in some way. Diane becomes depressed and nearly has a breakdown but after resting at her mother’s husband’s villa she decides to take a different approach and considers adoption.
Diane adopts a five-year-old boy from an orphanage in rural Thailand. The people running the orphanage have no idea where he is from and have only heard him say “Lu” and “Sian” so they called him “Lu-Sian”. Diane decides to call him Lucien. Once she’s back in her homeland of France, she gets into an auto accident and her little boy is left in a coma. The doctors tell her that his chance of survival is slim to none. However, one single doctor, Dr. Rolf van Kaen, says the boy can still be saved by using acupuncture and Eastern medicine.
The boy is saved but Dr. van Kaen is later found dead. The cause of death - his heart inexplicably exploded. The police trace the unusual method of death to a tribe in northern Mongolia. The police also discovered that Dr. van Kaen was an East German and worked in the former Soviet Union at a nuclear power plant located in Siberia near the Mongolian border.
Diane, with the help of an anthropologist, discovers that her son Lucien is not from Thailand. In fact, he’s not from Southeast Asia. The words he uses were determined to be Mongolian and used by a certain tribe called the Tsevens who also lived near the nuclear power plant and were victims of an atrocious accident. This confirms Diane’s suspicions that all the deaths are somehow related to this nuclear power plant, the Mongolian tribe, and her adopted son.
The story takes you on a roller-coaster ride starting from a flight to Thailand, back to France, then Germany, Russia, and finally to Mongolia where the mystery reaches its conclusion. Fast-paced and absorbing, you will not want to set down the novel until you reach its end. You cannot help but root for Diane as she travels all over the country to save her son. I’m sure any mother would do the same. ~Ernie Hoyt