Mulisch questions our endless desire to imitate a Jehovah in whom we do not believe. Rarely linear, the novel has philosophical diversions that give us the wild daring of a very exciting mind.For example, in introducing the reader to Werker, Mulisch suddenly launches an enquiry in to the importance of naming “Could Adolf Hitler also have been called Bubi Mauskopf Imagine that Joseph… called the child Maurice – what would have become of Christianity?”There are passages exploring the nature of writing and literary creation. Even a condensed Hebrew lesson teaches us the alphabet and how to pronounce it, in one paragraph. There are even musings on how urban architecture affects the psyche: “Think of that marvellous curve in Regent Street in London; you won’t find anything like that in the whole of America. If I were a town planner I would never draw a straight street because only a curve embraces you like a mother.”The act of creation haunts the narrative, and Mulisch has found an original and seductive way of exploring hubris.

If the tragedy of Rabbi Loew is that he cannot create a male golem, then Werker’s tragedy is that, although he can create laboratory life, he cannot create a living child. His baby Aurora strangles herself in the womb with her umbilical cord.Werker writes to his dead child, explaining why her mother has left him. This poignant device gives Mulisch enormous freedom for his extraordinary lateral style, allowing him to career from complex biology to the drone of everyday experience He tells Aurora about frequenting restaurants alone. “I’m suddenly looked at rather pityingly but that’s of course typically Dutch: you only eat out when something special’s happening, otherwise it’s a waste of money.”There is much humour in the book. Werker imagines his mother tricking his father so that she can conceive.

She has to calculate the moment of ovulation and then persuade him to coitus non interruptus. He then describes his own horrific birth, with his soldier father inappropriately dressed in full military honours.Mulisch treats us to wonderful observations about human desire and behaviour patterns. For instance, Werker observes how his abandoned girlfriend became his father’s lover, a woman with “large breasts, perhaps too thin legs, and a rather rough skin”. We know from the earlier description of his mother that the woman is a mirror image.The hole in the centre of Werker’s life is his failure with Clara at the death-birth of their child “Sorrow cannot be undone. Heaven is only conceivable as the Realm of Amnesia, that is as a psychiatric institution”. There is a touching search for family as Werker hunts for the triplets who drank his mother’s copious milk.

He tells his daughter that he has found her “milk uncles”, and three identical men in grey suits arrive bearing a symbolic carton of milk.At dinner, Werker finds his “brothers” are respectable bourgeois men “without calamities”, with whom he cannot connect. They never meet again, and Mulisch lurches the narrative into a murder mystery. Werker is ultimately punished for daring to create life, repeating in microcosm the tragedy of what happened to the Czech Jews. Mulisch implies that he who dares to create life must be destroyed, as if to confirm the author’s own observation – that all literature is theology.Julia Pascal’s play ‘The Yiddish Queen Lear’ is at the Bridewell Theatre, London EC4 , from 25 September to 20 October, and will be published by Oberon Books. Despite all the attention Israel receives, it is a country with an everyday reality that remains virtually unknown. To its enemies, it has the aura of an evil superpower; to many diaspora Jews, it is a mythic playground; to Christian pilgrims, a site of a historical holiness; to fans of Eurotrash decadence, the culture that produced Dana International.