The Enigma of Room 622 by Joel Dicker

The Enigma of Room 622 is many things—an homage, a murder mystery, the tale of a boardroom battle, a love triangle and Joel Dicker’s attempt at self-insertion.

Let’s begin with the prologue. We’re transported to the Hotel de Verbier in the Swiss Alps on a snowy morning in December. It’s early and still dark. A hotel employee makes his way to a guest’s room with a breakfast tray.

“On the carpet of room 622 lay a corpse.”

With an in medias res opening which places us smack in the middle of the main conflict, Joel Dicker gets off to a great start. The reader is immediately drawn in.

What follows is Dicker donning the double-sided cloak of a professional writer and an amateur sleuth. The first chapter opens with how he, Joel Dicker travelled to Hotel de Verbier, a luxury hotel in the summer of 2018 hoping to recover from two recent personal traumas—the death of his publisher, Bernard de Fallois and the abrupt end of a short-lived romantic relationship.

His curiosity is piqued by an anomaly in the numbering of the hotel rooms. There is no Room 622. There is 621, 623 and 621A. Some investigative work by Scarlett, a guest at the same hotel and Dicker’s partner-in-crime-solving reveals the cause for the erasure of Room 622—an unsolved murder.

The characters populating the world of this mystery are Macaire Ebezner who, in the wake of his father's passing a year ago, is all set to take over as president of one of the largest family-owned banks in Switzerland. All he needs is for the bank’s board to elect him.

On the board are Macaire’s uncle, Horace Hansen; his cousin and Horace’s son, Jean Bénédict Hansen and Sinior Tarnogol, a shadowy presence who manipulated his way to a spot on the bank’s board fifteen years ago.

The board’s machinations to pick a president and the challenges posed to Macaire’s ascension by Lev Levovitch, the banking wunderkind with secrets of his own are all connected to the murder.

In his usual style, Joel Dicker packs The Enigma of Room 622 with a veritable torrent of twists and flashbacks, making his readers work hard for even tiny parcels of information. In fact, it takes about 380 pages of this 563-page novel for the reader to even discover the identity of the murder victim. Talk about unanswered questions!

There is no fact small enough to be revealed without a flashback or later, even a flash-forward. It’s bit gimmicky, but addictive nonetheless. I’m willing to bet Dicker has never met a cliffhanger he didn’t like!

This is a thriller through and through with plenty of twists, pacy chapters, narrative suspense and foreshadowing. In a way, this novel reminded me of Jeffrey Archer right before he became so formulaic that it became hard to tell one book from another. Dicker, like Archer, knows how to hook his reader and write a page-turner. That’s great but it gets old if you use the same tricks every time.

For a fairly long book, The Enigma of Room 622 fails to create characters who feel real and fleshed out. The following lines spoken by Lev Levovitch is a rare moment when his thoughts reveal the beliefs behind his actions.

"Because love doesn't exist. It's a mirage, a social construct. Or, if you prefer, love exists only if it isn't materialised. It's a spiritual emanation made of hope, expectation, and projection.”

Macaire is the other character whose actions we have some insight into but it’s limited to his ambition to follow his father as president. The focus remains majorly on plot progression rather than character development. Most of the characters operate like plot devices, living only to take the story forward. The most glaringly underdeveloped character is the main female character, Anastasia. Even at the centre of a love triangle, she lacks agency and a mind of her own like a desert lacks precipitation. Frankly, it gets quite trying.

In terms of style, I enjoy Dicker’s bringing literary devices into the genre of thriller or crime fiction. That said, I felt like the framing device he uses of becoming a part of the story doesn’t do much for the story apart from being a vehicle to pay homage to his friend and publisher, Bernard de Fallois. That, and giving us a peek into how authors grow stories from the tiny seed of an idea and the easter eggs they often scatter through their manuscript.

All in all, The Enigma of Room 622 is engaging but somehow, it lacks the emotional core of The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair. This may have been caused partly by characters the reader doesn't root for and in part by the ex deus machina ending sprung on us to explain everything conveniently with some spit and polish.