When I shared my favourite books of 2018, I was disappointed not to be able to identify a single unifying thread. Except, perhaps, that each of my selected nineteen turned out to be so much better than I expected. Which got me thinking – and this isn’t particularly profound – how difficult it is to tell how much I’m going to like a book from the publisher’s advance information and blurb. That thought was at the forefront of my mind when I considered pairing my first two reads of 2019: both translations from the French set elsewhere, and featuring characters traumatised by war, but very different books. If you’re a regular visitor to annethology, I wonder if you can guess which of the two I was least looking forward to reading, but could well be one of this year’s favourite reads.
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Retribution Road by Antonin Varenne translated by
Sam Taylor
Summer, 1858, and London’s sewers can’t cope with the drought. The Great Stink is accompanied by cholera which, unfortunately, is largely believed to be airborne and water a barrier rather than a carrier of disease. While the educated eagerly anticipate a lecture by Wallace and Darwin, the poor anaesthetise themselves with opium and drink. The Thames River Police, “a sort of laborious retirement for deserving or desperate soldiers” (p77), veterans of the East India Company, patrol the Docklands, beyond the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.
Arthur Bowman is one such officer, having returned, mentally and physically scarred, from Burma six years before. A sergeant in the Company’s private army, he was selected for his violence, ability to lead and to follow orders, and sent on a secret, and doomed, mission up the Irrawaddy River. Captured, caged and tortured[1] deep in the forest for almost a year, he emerged, with nine others, like a walking corpse.
When Bowman discovers a body in a London sewer, with multiple incisions across chest and back, he’s deeply disturbed. The victim’s wounds mirroring his own scars, and those of his fellow survivors, he’s convinced one of them must be the killer. But when he passes on this information, not only is there no record of his and his comrades’ capture, he’s branded a murderer himself. As more mutilated bodies are reported, he sets out on a journey in search of the culprit that takes him through central and southern England and across the ocean to New York. From there, he follows the suspects’ scent to a failed utopian settlement near Dallas, via thriving and dying mining settlements and along the Pioneer Trail to Lake Tahoe and on to San Francisco, as Lincoln is elected and the country is torn apart by civil war.
Bowman is depicted as a brute and a racist right from the beginning in South India, and it’s testament to Antonin Varenne’s writing that we can care about him and his quest. While reading, romance and friendship soften him somewhat, it might be his rage at seeing former slaves and Native Americans hanged for another’s crimes that changes him most. But he remains a killer, as well as an extremely traumatised man whose night terrors disturb his own and others’ sleep, although we sense his redemption at the end.
At over 500 tightly-packed pages, this is a long novel to which it’s difficult to do justice in a short review. But there’s plenty to keep you turning those pages, whether your literary interest is mid-nineteenth century global history, adventure, suspense, the psychology of the impact of trauma or the sociopolitics of the symbiotic relationship of commerce and killing. First published in France in 2014, perhaps my first read of 2019 will to prove to be one of my favourites of the year. Thanks to MacLehose Press for my review copy.
[1] If you'd find that disturbing to read, as I would, it might be reassuring to know it's only indirectly described.
Arthur Bowman is one such officer, having returned, mentally and physically scarred, from Burma six years before. A sergeant in the Company’s private army, he was selected for his violence, ability to lead and to follow orders, and sent on a secret, and doomed, mission up the Irrawaddy River. Captured, caged and tortured[1] deep in the forest for almost a year, he emerged, with nine others, like a walking corpse.
When Bowman discovers a body in a London sewer, with multiple incisions across chest and back, he’s deeply disturbed. The victim’s wounds mirroring his own scars, and those of his fellow survivors, he’s convinced one of them must be the killer. But when he passes on this information, not only is there no record of his and his comrades’ capture, he’s branded a murderer himself. As more mutilated bodies are reported, he sets out on a journey in search of the culprit that takes him through central and southern England and across the ocean to New York. From there, he follows the suspects’ scent to a failed utopian settlement near Dallas, via thriving and dying mining settlements and along the Pioneer Trail to Lake Tahoe and on to San Francisco, as Lincoln is elected and the country is torn apart by civil war.
Bowman is depicted as a brute and a racist right from the beginning in South India, and it’s testament to Antonin Varenne’s writing that we can care about him and his quest. While reading, romance and friendship soften him somewhat, it might be his rage at seeing former slaves and Native Americans hanged for another’s crimes that changes him most. But he remains a killer, as well as an extremely traumatised man whose night terrors disturb his own and others’ sleep, although we sense his redemption at the end.
At over 500 tightly-packed pages, this is a long novel to which it’s difficult to do justice in a short review. But there’s plenty to keep you turning those pages, whether your literary interest is mid-nineteenth century global history, adventure, suspense, the psychology of the impact of trauma or the sociopolitics of the symbiotic relationship of commerce and killing. First published in France in 2014, perhaps my first read of 2019 will to prove to be one of my favourites of the year. Thanks to MacLehose Press for my review copy.
[1] If you'd find that disturbing to read, as I would, it might be reassuring to know it's only indirectly described.
Small Country by Gaël Faye translated by Sarah Ardizzone
The son of a French father and Rwandan mother, ten-year-old Gabriel lives, along with his younger sister Ana, in a comfortable cul-de-sac in Bujumbura, Burundi. He doesn’t know much about politics but when, in June 1993, the country goes to the polls after thirty years of one-party rule, he’s infected with the excitement, and rivalry between, his family’s cook and driver. But the military is dissatisfied with the result and assassinates the new president. Yet, for a while at least, life continues as before in Gabriel’s sheltered quarter of the city, his country’s troubles eclipsed by the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. Unfortunately for Gabriel, even his youth can’t keep him aloof from the encroaching violence.
The blurb paints an idyllic picture of Gabriel’s life before the coup, but that wasn’t how I read it. Differences between his parents have led to his mother moving out of the family home, while his father repeatedly leaves the children alone in the house at night. Racism is rife within the expat community, including his father’s close friend, an older Belgian who he says has taught him all he knows about Africa, referring to his cook as a baboon. He is also becoming to recognise the stark inequalities, and struggles with guilt when going to retrieve his stolen bike from a boy in an undeveloped rural area who will never have the opportunity to ride another. But he does enjoy getting up to mischief with his friends.
When that mischief escalates into arming themselves with grenades, Gabriel wants no part of it and stays at home reading books. But then his mother returns from Rwanda with terrible stories about the demise of his cousins that she no longer has the wit to keep to herself. Vicariously traumatised, Gabriel is drawn back into the gang, becoming complicit in a disturbing retaliatory act.
A prize-winning bestseller when published in 2016 in France, this is certainly an important story but, for me, it didn’t live up to the hype. I found the characters flat, a preponderance of telling over showing, with scenes that seemed to promise tension before fizzling out. I did wake up for the final sixth of the novel (briefly summarised in the previous paragraph), but it felt too little too late. The style might have been intended as subtle (although the occasional philosophising suggests not), or to replicate the impact of trauma, but it read like a story too close to home that the author hadn’t sufficiently processed yet. Thanks to Hogarth Press for my review copy.
The blurb paints an idyllic picture of Gabriel’s life before the coup, but that wasn’t how I read it. Differences between his parents have led to his mother moving out of the family home, while his father repeatedly leaves the children alone in the house at night. Racism is rife within the expat community, including his father’s close friend, an older Belgian who he says has taught him all he knows about Africa, referring to his cook as a baboon. He is also becoming to recognise the stark inequalities, and struggles with guilt when going to retrieve his stolen bike from a boy in an undeveloped rural area who will never have the opportunity to ride another. But he does enjoy getting up to mischief with his friends.
When that mischief escalates into arming themselves with grenades, Gabriel wants no part of it and stays at home reading books. But then his mother returns from Rwanda with terrible stories about the demise of his cousins that she no longer has the wit to keep to herself. Vicariously traumatised, Gabriel is drawn back into the gang, becoming complicit in a disturbing retaliatory act.
A prize-winning bestseller when published in 2016 in France, this is certainly an important story but, for me, it didn’t live up to the hype. I found the characters flat, a preponderance of telling over showing, with scenes that seemed to promise tension before fizzling out. I did wake up for the final sixth of the novel (briefly summarised in the previous paragraph), but it felt too little too late. The style might have been intended as subtle (although the occasional philosophising suggests not), or to replicate the impact of trauma, but it read like a story too close to home that the author hadn’t sufficiently processed yet. Thanks to Hogarth Press for my review copy.
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