The Final Charge
by Dawood Ali McCallum (Sandstone Press, ISBN 9781908737922)
This intriguing novel takes as its starting point an atrocity committed by British forces fighting the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s: the murder and mutilation of one of its most charismatic leaders, General Jembe.
Half a century on from that bloody conflict, Dr Tom Miles is arrested while on holiday in Kenya and charged with the killing, an accusation that escalates into one of war crime when it emerges that, as a young Army officer, he participated in Operation Anvil, a covert attempt by the British to wipe out the entire Mau Mau leadership.
Tom is caught between a politically motivated prosecutor, Paul Muya, and a defence counsel seemingly more interested in the forthcoming rally race – The Final Charge – than in securing a not-guilty verdict. A further complication is the diplomatic threat the case poses to a massive aid package being negotiated by the Kenyan government.
Struggling to dredge up accurate memories of what actually happened and what part he himself played, Tom is enmeshed in a web of political machinations he can’t begin to understand, and whose endgame could be catastrophic for him.
The Final Charge is a gripping study of power and corruption and a meditation on the scope and limitations of a legal system when considering war crimes. Dawood Ali McCallum’s writing style is rather stilted and his characters somewhat under-drawn, but there is passion and intelligence at work here and the reader is left with some profound questions as to the nature of evil and our judicial response to it.
★★★ PW
The End of Days
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Portobello, ISBN 9781846275135)
If you have read Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, the bare bones of The End of Days may sound familiar. A baby is born, a baby dies. But what if she doesn’t? What if her death were averted? In both books, the protagonist is allowed to die and not-die, and as chapter builds on chapter, a life is lived – with the cold hand of Fate hovering in the background to snuff it out, or not, as it sees fit.
So much for the similarities. But Erpenbeck, who is also an opera director in her native Germany, creates in half as many pages a book twice as good. Her narrative style, reminiscent of the sublime José Saramago, is poetic and magnetic (and no small praise should go to the translator for her part in this).
Dialogue is muted – no extraneous words here – and the language simple. Yet in just 200-odd pages, The End of Days covers 90 years and moves from Galicia to Berlin via Vienna and Moscow, as the protagonist’s life plays out against a backdrop of the 20th century’s key historical events.
Until the final chapter, the protagonist is not named. In her anonymity, she represents each one of us – a sobering thought. It’s hard to put a positive spin on the idea that we are all at the mercy of fate, and Erpenbeck doesn’t try. But, existential questions aside, this is a wonderfully crafted, memorable read.
★★★★ JL
The Drum Tower
by Farnoosh Moshiri (Sandstone Press, ISBN 9781910124024)
Iranian writer Farnoosh Moshiri has undergone experiences in her own life that a fiction writer would hesitate to deal out to a character. She fled into exile with her young son in 1983 as the Islamic regime began a wave of arrests and executions of political activists, intellectuals and feminists.
She travelled across the mountains to Afghanistan and spent four years in refugee camps there and in India before emigrating to the US in 1987. In exile, it was several years before she felt able to write again but, gradually, in the 1990s she began publishing a series of well-received novels and collections.
Her latest novel is the sweeping, magisterial family saga The Drum Tower, set in the 1970s, against the backdrop of the fall of the Shah and the Islamic revolution. In Tehran, in a house known as the Drum Tower, lives a young girl, Talkhoon.
In the household is Talkhoon’s sister, Taara, her grandparents and her forbidding uncle, Asaad. The girls’ father is in hiding and their mother is missing, facts which seem to inspire a fierce hatred of Talkhoon by her grandmother, who keeps her confined in the basement. In the tower of the house, Talkhoon’s grandfather works obsessively on a vast book concerning the Simorgh, the legendary Iranian Bird of Knowledge, as the revolution edges ever closer.
Ambitious in scope, labyrinthine in construction and peopled with vivid and believable characters, The Drum Tower hurtles to a stirring climax on the roof of the house as mysteries are resolved and fates are decided.
★★★★ PW
They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing democracy from Greece to Occupy
by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini (Verso ISBN 978 1 78168 097 1)
People are becoming so apolitical (or anti-political) they don’t even bother to vote, the mainstream media asserts. Yet in recent years, millions have taken to the street, occupied public squares, created people’s assemblies, and for weeks or months on end, brought parts of major cities to a halt.
Are they being ‘apolitical’? Far from it. Based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Greece, the US, Venezuela and Argentina, They can't represent us gives a picture of an alternative politics in the making, one which does not always have clear results, as one Greek interviewee says, but is having undeniable effects.
The protests examined are a massive ‘no’ – to the destructive impetus of capitalism, to a liberal democracy that both claims monopoly status and is easily bought by corporate power.
But the movements also say a massive ‘yes’ to alternatives – horizontal ways of organizing, direct and participatory democracy, ‘recuperation’ of work and other spaces, creation of barter networks, communal services and so on. As the authors say: ‘The mobilizations we have seen are laboratories of democracy.’
Activists and intellectuals, Sitrin and Azzellini are good at providing history and context for what is happening. Their book does not pretend to be comprehensive: movements in Britain, Iceland, Ireland are not included. But it’s inspiring stuff, politically and intellectually, while the personal accounts vividly bring to life what it is like to be a part of what Sitrin calls ‘everyday revolutions’.
★★★★ VB
Also out there...
MUSIC
Avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s Fourth World Vol 1/Possible Musics gets a long overdue re-release via German label Glitterbeat. Dating from 1980, the importance of this album, in expanding the sense of what music is, can’t be over-estimated. It’s just taken a lot of people a long time to get there.
Different Every Time (Domino) is the double CD/LP compilation of works by Robert Wyatt stretching from early days in Soft Machine and Matching Mole to recent times. Collaborations are to the fore, with musicians such as Björk, Phil Manzanera and Jeanette Lindstrom. Naturally, ‘Shipbuilding’, the Elvis Costello/Clive Langer song that Wyatt so inimitably made his own, shines like the star it is.
FILM
The Green Prince, written and directed by Nadav Schirman, ‘documents’ an astonishing Israeli coup – secret service Shin Bet’s recruitment of the son of a high-profile Hamas founder who, for 10 years, informs on pending Hamas operations.
The film’s personal focus reduces the Israeli occupation to the story of the growing friendship between the Palestinian informant, Mosab Hassan Yousef, and his cheery Israeli handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak, acting together to ‘save lives’. It’s gripping and dramatic, weirdly orientalist, and suspect.
Finding Vivian Maier, directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, is worth anyone’s time for two reasons. There’s the astonishing story of a brilliant, empathic American street photographer whose work only emerged after her death in 2009 with the chance purchase at auction of unidentified negatives. And then there’s the superb sample of some of her 150,000 photographs.
BOOKS
Sumia Sukkar’s The Boy From Aleppo Who Painted the War (Eyewear Publishing) is a harrowing account of the Syrian civil war, as seen through the eyes of Adam, a teenage boy who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome.
His incomprehension in the face of violence is fully matched by the chaos of war and by the Syrians’ own inability to make sense of the conflict. Adam brings a sense of optimism to an otherwise bleak novel, teaching us a lesson in humanity.
The next stage in British comedian Russell Brand’s rambunctious journey of radical political discovery is accompanied by Revolution, a book, published by Cornerstone. He certainly has a way when it comes to causing the stir that gets ideas that others have been articulating far more coherently, and for far longer, heard by a much wider audience.
