Drina Bridge
By Jim Bartley
Raincoast Books, 329 pages, $30
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon
FIRST novels demand patience, their pages usually filled with as much stumbling as swaggering.
Jim Bartley, a Toronto-based playwright, has spent the last several years reviewing first novels for the Globe and Mail. Now he has written his own first novel, which is set in the former Yugoslavia in 1941-45 and 1991-95.
Not surprisingly, Drina Bridge is a self-conscious affair, where each character has a heightened sense of what exactly they are contributing to the story.
Take the opening paragraph: "A basket of eyeballs. This I saw on the desk of General Zemko Izgorevic, war hero of Serbia. There were other generals: Morcelle, the French one; McKenzie, the Canadian; an Israeli; a Dutch; and still others. The generals of peace. All hopeless venal masturbators awash in their own goodness."
Read on and you discover that the narrator of this section, Slobodan Kusic, is half-Muslim and half-Serb and, apparently, dead.
Which shouldn't present a problem for the novel, given Alice Sebold's success in The Lovely Bones (2002) using the same device, except that we soon learn that Slobo has fabricated the entire episode.
Slobo is alive and (relatively) well in the psychiatric ward of a Sarajevo hospital. He spends most of his waking hours writing his memoirs.
After two pilgrimages across much of Bosnia, one as a child and one as an old man, he knows the basket of eyeballs makes for a grotesque and arresting opening image -- and he uses it to enhance his story even though a literal basket of eyeballs wasn't a part of his experience.
As a survivor of several generations of conflict, Slobo is prone to swaggering gory invention of what might have been placed alongside descriptions of what did happen.
The novel's other narrator, Chris, is a gay man from Toronto researching the origins of his lover, who has recently died of AIDS. He winds up in a monastery in Serbia just over the border from the Bosnian village where his lover was born.
Because he is a Canadian safe within the walls of the monastery, Chris's voyage is much easier than Slobo's. But living in the midst of people bound up and ravaged by ancient ethnic conflicts changes and enlarges his experience:
"Grief is singular, a personal black hole," he says. "Here I've looked into a black pit dug for others. This year the pit has only gaped larger. I'm living in a place where beauty and agony have no distance between them."
This knife's edge produces all kinds of doubts and ambiguities, from Chris's self-conscious but growing faith to his own tendency to fabricate (and then confess to the fabrication of) sexual encounters in his letters to worried friends back home.
That points to a larger problem, as the constant revelation that our narrators are unreliable distorts the genuine feeling in the novel.
It also raises a question: Are Slobo's descriptions of tragedy meant to document the ambiguities and suffering of war, or are they only brutal entertainments, intended to manipulate and titillate?
Chris is reading Slobo's text almost at the same time as readers -- and discusses it with his friends. This forces Bartley into the position of critiquing half of his text within the text itself.
It is difficult to tell if these wrinkles are due to first-time jitters or been-around-the-block cleverness. But they feel like parlour tricks when compared to the real strengths of the book, which include writing knowledgeably and movingly about a conflict Bartley has no blood ties to.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.
* * *
You know the bit players that moan about the scenes that stayed on the cutting room floor?
Well, though I am not unhappy with my review of Jim Bartley's Drina Bridge as it appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press this weekend, I gnash my teeth at what was slicerooed: brilliant comparisons to the work of Timothy Findley, Edeet Ravel, and Rawi Hage.
I suppose if I request to review a book nearly a month after it's been published, I shouldn't be surprised if my review is a low priority.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. That's just how it goes in a season where dozens of new books come out every week.
I've got the latest Neil Gaiman on the go as we speak.
Fun!
2 comments:
Hi Ariel,
Much thanks for your review of Drina Bridge. I just have a
few observations to make, which I hope you'll accept in the
spirit of writerly exchange.
You ask in your review if Drina Bridge and Slobo's memoir
are perhaps dealing in "titillation" and "brutal
entertainment," an important question for any war novel.
But then you don't draw from the book to expand the issue or
answer the question. If you're going to criticise the novel
for not dealing adequately with the real cost of war, with
the tragedy and atrocity and wasted lives, then you're of
course obligated to discuss the parts of the novel that
address these issues.
I wonder if you recall the episode in New York in which
Chris views what might be called war porn (the Zvornik
video) and is disturbed deeply by the knowledge that it's
being casually copied and distibuted and probably viewed by
god knows who all across world. Do you recall him later
accusing Axel of carelessly distirubuting this brutal
entertainment? Do you recall Martin Ivry's transcript of
his interview with Slobo, in which Slobo talks about viewers
around the world comfortably "savouring the leftovers" of
the Bosnian conflict on the TV news? Both Chris and Slobo
deal explicitly, critically, with the issue of titillation
in violence, with the idea of atrocity as brutal
entertainment. Slobo, also in the interview, explicitly
addresses the brutality of combattants themselves and their
own brutal wartime entertainments. Why else does he
repeatedly call these hell-raising young guys "Rambos?". (He
also describes soldiers who enjoy "creating a little circle
of hell, just so they can see what it looks like.") Why
does he recall at length his childhood war games with other
boys in the woods at Zepa, and write that he is shamed and
saddened by his memory of their cruelty to each other?
These passages would have informed the review. They contain
character and thematic stuff that's hugely relevant to your
concerns of titillation and voyeurism. I wish you'd engaged
these issues as the novel does. But instead of addressing
the many parts of the book that defuse your criticisms, you
asked rhetorical questions without answering them, implying
that the book is, at least in part, titillation and
entertainment. Of course it is --- because we know this is
how it will be read and enjoyed by some. We all know this.
Violence entertains not because I or Slobo want it to, but
because war and suffering will always be savoured that way
by some, and will usually excite all of us at some level,
even as we know how odious it is to associate suffering with
thrills. Slobo underscores this tragic appeal of the
horrible quite obviously, as I noted above, but also in many
satirical passages, like the one about the appalling Serb
militia leader, "Spaso, the saviour." Chris says in a
letter to Toni, after mentioning Spaso, "I've thought,
watching films, that people who exit the theatre at the
first bloodshed might be our real saviours. Our Saints. But
we don't know how to venerate them. We think, Pity they
can't take it."
You failed to show readers that both of Drina's central
characters are deeply conscious of, and distressed by, the
entertainment value of war and brutality, that they both
think about it often and lament the ways of those with power
and guns and TV cameras. Instead you talk about Slobo's
"parlour tricks" and fabrications, framing him as a
titillator and casual deceiver. You've done me and my novel
quite a disservice, Ariel. Your readers now have a
distorted and backward notion of the book: that it's a
thinly veiled gift to the blood-and-gore fans. Well, I can't
stop them from finding their thrills. The book grapples with
atrocity, shows it, forces a response, and Slobo wants to
catch the nice folks partaking too. If you were appalled (an
understandable response), how could you fail to notice that
Slobo and Chris are too? If you were even momentarily
titillated, how could you not absorb Slobo's shaming memory
of his boyhood cruelty, his callow pleasure in it. You don't
have to like a book, but you do have to base your response
and critique on a careful reading, and an openness.
Only in in your last sentence do you mention that the book
has "real strengths", that I write "movingly" about the
conflict. You don't say more. Don't you think readers want
to know what is strong and moving in the book? As with your
criticisms, you don't draw from the text to support your
judgement. Might Stefan have been mentioned? That Chris
falls in love with Stefan and becomes intimately involved in
Stefan's journey (literally), and in his personal losses,
this is the most important thing that happens to Chris in
the book. It's what keeps him at the monastery. Did this
central story element move you at all? I'm still wondering
what moved you. I guess your readers are too. You mention on
your site that your editor cut references to Findley's The Wars and Hage's DeNiro's Game and other books. Might the review have run in full if you'd written more about the novel that was assigned?
I would also hope that you never again begin a review of a
first novel with a catagorical denigration of first novels.
The critical community is long past that sort of casual,
knowing condescension to new writers. I've written almost
300 first-fiction reviews in the last eight years, and I
guarantee that you will not find me making catagorical
put-downs of any subset of writers or any genre. The job is
to review the book.
A quick word on the basket of eyeballs. Slobo does not pull
this out of thin air for cheap effect. In Vedrana's letter
(Slobo's sister), chapter 41, she writes about Slobo's use
of the eyeballs and other fanciful parts of the memoir, then
she concedes, "Some say the eyeballs were real." So we know
we're dealing with some sort of war myth, something with
believers and debunkers. (It is indeed a Yugo war myth. In
fact I haven't invented anything in the book about Yugoslav
history or culture, unless it came to me as invention or
myth already. See Drina's opening note "on history and
fiction.") Slobo doesn't play havoc with the truth. He
plays with human folly, faulty memory, with chance and fate,
with bloated myth (the million Serbs honouring St Lazar and
Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo Field).
Well..... enough said. I hesitated to write this, but I had
to stop stewing and turn my indignant thoughts into
sentences and let you know what your work stirred in me. I
hope you don't take this note as an attack. It's meant as a
reasoned defense and as food for thought. I hope it might
somehow help advance our (yours and mine) undervalued,
underpaid, but very worthy work in the bookchat world.
I'd also like to know your thoughts on Irene Nemirovsky's
war novel, Suite Francaise. I'm just over halfway through
and finding it sometimes brilliant but mostly unmoving. Her
view of humanity, including her main characters, seems very
jaundiced. She doesn't seem to like people at all (or maybe
just French people.) She has the outside view, not being
French, but she seems to take special delight in dissecting
or killing off her petty and deluded Frenchies. But a
fascinating book, with some very shrewd insights into
people's dark and calculating hearts. (Now I've slipped into
reviewer-speak. Oy.)
Hope to hear from you.
All best,
Jim
Hey Jim,
As I won't be able to respond to any of your questions or concerns about my review until next week sometime - I've got fifty or so pages of poetry to read before a workshop on the weekend - I wanted to make sure you knew I wasn't avoiding you.
Yours,
Ariel
Post a Comment