The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway

“It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as the were.  Then the visible world exploded.”

And so begins Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, with menace that becomes like a refrain, repeated three times in the opening chapter, though with the last we see the tense change to the present. This is not a simple recollection of the past, but the space between shelling as persistent as breathing. We are thrown into the conflict (the longest siege in modern warfare), when a cellist decides he will honour the 22 people killed by shelling while waiting for bread by playing an adiago, the same adiago, on the site for 22 days. Assuming he survives.

And with impact of the first chapter, the novel is fractured into three stories. First there is Arrow, a young female sniper who attempts to protect Sarajevo from the men in the hills, working for the government, yet choosing her own targets until she is asked to protect the cellist from enemy snipers. Second, there is Kenan, a father who must cross the wartorn city just to get water for his family. And third, we have Dragan, an older man whose family has fled, and who must face his own (all-too understandable) cowardice and the day’s menace simply to get some bread.

Galloway’s prose is clean, sharp, and sparing, as if in the face of death and destruction, each word matters. It is a book that eschews politics and comes alive in the details of daily life under siege — the practicalities of water containers, the possibility of crossing a street, or the plans for a party if the electricity came on. And it is these tiny details, rather than debates over politics or grandiose philosophizing that have justly earned Galloway praise.  Of course this slender novel also grapples with issues of tremendous weight:  Are hate and fear essential to survival? What is a city, a people, made of? What is left after destruction?

The cellist offers a model for the Galloway’s three characters, as each discovers their moment of rebellion — the refusal to be governed by fear. They temporarily reclaim their imprisoned city, doing something as similar as walking instead of running, despite the threat of snipers. And the victories of the citizens present hope for the city as well. While reading The Cellist of Sarajevo, I was often reminded of Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, of the connection between people and place and of Lucjan’s stories of Warsaw during World War II:

Cities, like people, are born with a soul, a spirit of place that continues to make itself known, emerging even after devastation, and old word looking for meaning in the new mouth that speaks it. For though there were no buildings left and there was waste farther than the horizon, Warsaw never stopped being a city.

So although the shelling seems to be the end of “things as they were,” our protagonists slowly discover that Sarajevo never stops being a city,  and its citizens never stop being people, though they must struggle to discover what kind of people they want to be.

Suggested companion reading:
The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

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The Wars, by Timothy Findley

Each year on Remembrance Day I find myself at a loss. Not at a loss for those who were lost, but rather, because growing up when I have, with violence so far from home, with full-scale war a thing of history text books, the experience of the men and women who died seems unfathomable. The last couple years, fearing apathy and ignorance, I decided to read novels about the wars around Remembrance Day. And it’s helped tremendously – for what better medium to empathize with someone than through literature? And so, though I’m a bit early this year, I find myself like the unidentified narrator of Findley’s The Wars, attempting to find one life (even a fictional one) to revive through story.

The Wars attempts to discover the story of Robert Ross, a 19 year old Canadian who decides to enter the First World War after his cherished sister’s unexpected death. We follow Ross through training, across the ocean, through the trenches, and in the hospitals, watching the gradual transformation of this gentle soul into an embittered, angry combatant. His disillusion is cemented when he is gang raped in the complete darkness by anonymous fellow officers – those he should be able to trust. In the darkness, the clearest enemy is the enemy within.

As a foil to this human spiritual decline, Findley assembles a veritable menagerie of animals – ducks, rabbits, toads, rats, horses, dogs and so on. Rather than suggesting man’s bestial nature, they are aligned with lost innocence from the very beginning, when Ross’ crippled sister dies among her rabbits.  Even at the very end, Ross does not hesitate to shoot a fellow officer in the face, but he is determined to save the horses. Various characters rendered sympathetic based on their relationships with animals. Take Rodwell, whom Ross shares a bunker with, and who nurses wounded animals back to health. When Rodwell is sent to the front, he gives Ross a toad to free and this letter for his daughter:

To my daughter, Laurine;
Love your mother.
Make your prayers against despair.
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your finger tips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
I am your father always.

I’m quoting this not only because it made me cry on public transit (there you go Anna), but because in writing The Wars, in trying to reassemble the past, Findley has provided an essential gateway for those of us who would forget, or who would never have known. And I think there can be no better, and no more essential message for war literature and for all those who died than: “Touch these pages and you have me in your finger tips. We survive in one another.”

Lest we forget.

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The Rules of Engagement, by Catherine Bush

The Globe and Mail review of The Rules of Engagement stated that “As any fine novel should, it raises more questions than it answers.” Appropriately so, as it deals with two of humanity’s most puzzling creations – love and war. Some would say that the opposite of love is hate, but as my Grade 7 religion teacher once asserted, the opposite of love isn’t hate, but apathy. I think this idea is actually much closer to the reality of The Rules of Engagement, where love and violence are so caught up in each other, that the only way to counter them is with separation – both physical and emotional. One of the characters suggests that the opposite of love is actually fear, and perhaps fear keeps a person from becoming involved, though it seems to me that fear has its place on both sides.

The Rules of Engagement follows Arcadia, a young  Canadian woman living in London, England, who studies contemporary war and military intervention.  Yet as it turns out, Arcadia’s academic interest in war is a way of separating herself from violent reality and her own violent past – in which two young men who were in love with her, fought a pistol duel over her.  As she tries to impose reason and order on both violence and passion, Arcadia becomes involved with Amir, a man actively involved with helping people escape war ravaged countries. When Arcadia discovers his involvement, she is furious, and flees, for despite all her academic studies, Arcadia can never really decide when intervention is necessary.

Perhaps the equation of love and war is an easy one, and certainly they have been used together before. But Bush’s parallels are sophisticated and evocative. The duel might seem unrealistic, but it is the perfect fusion of love and violence, a ritualized violence with its own rules that only provide the illusion of safety.  Arcadia dreams of dismemberment – a mark both of violence, and of old Petrarchan convention, that praises each of a woman’s body parts separately. Bush doesn’t dwell on an idealized love, one that is an antidote to violence, though there is hope for a healthy relationship with Amir at the end. Yet I think she would argue that even opening your borders for another person involves great personal risk. Perhaps for those who have been in a life and death conflict, this approach trivializes war, yet as one who has only suffered the pain of love (or love lost, love denied), it works for me. Furthermore, Bush uses Basra, a Somalian refugee whom Amir helps smuggle into Canada, to parallel Arcadia’s own flight from violence. Basra is the anchor to real violence, perhaps a subtle reminder that there can be much more at stake than a broken heart.

Bush writes in an intelligent, literary style that takes a similar approach to Arcadia’s own – approaching the fray of passion from a distance, and yet, as in real life, the reader ends up hopelessly drawn in. It becomes much more than a simple read, getting under your skin. I had to take frequent pauses, and found myself glassy eyed as I contemplated what I read and how it related to my own past. While the language is refined, it evokes a raw, unavoidable pain. Take this scene, after a young Arcadia has fought with one of the future duellers:

I roamed the streets for hours, furious at him, furious at myself (fuck, a good fuck) and at the end of the afternoon, settled myself in the basement of the Davies College library, in a corner filled with books written in Cyrillic script, as quiet and out of the way as anywhere I could imagine. I yanked a book from the shelf and sat staring desparingly at upside-down Cyrillic. Neil found me there, which must have taken some searching, through the main stacks, through each of the college libraries. I caught his lope, the back of his tweed coat, bare legs between his hem and army boots, but refused to look up. The second time, he stopped, and when I looked (how could I not?), he yanked open his coat like any flasher -
FORGIVE
THE POOR
FOOL
-scrawled in black marker across his skin. All that skin. His face tipped at an angle, grinning wickedly but oddly scrunched up.

Since I begun with questions, let me finish with some of them that the book provokes about both love and war: What are the terms for intervention? What are our responsibilities? What are you willing to risk for something you believe in? Do borders provide safety or merely isolation? Who should we let within them? Is violence unavoidable? Is there even such a thing as being uninvolved? But most importantly, what are the rules of engagement? In the modern day, when more civilians die than soldiers, when children are weapons, when death doesn’t discriminate, and when love is free, but so is infidelity and divorce, when Jane Austen’s ritualized and regulated courtship has long been abandoned, perhaps there is only the pretense of rules, and so the battles of love and war surge on, and we alone must decide when to become involved.

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