THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK
REVIEW
Books of The Times; The Bell Tolls Again, This Time in
Eritrea
Date: September 26, 1989, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Section C; Page 17, Column 1; Cultural
Desk
Byline: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Lead: LEAD: To Asmara By Thomas Keneally 290 pages. Warner
Books. $18.95.
Text:
To Asmara By Thomas Keneally 290 pages. Warner Books. $18.95.
Throughout his long and prolific career, the Australian writer
Thomas Keneally has been drawn to
large historical events, sweeping moral and political issues.
''The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith'' (1972)
probed the clash between white and aborigine cultures in
turn-of-the-century Australia.
''Confederates'' (1980) examined the consequences of the
American Civil War on a group of
individuals. ''Schindler's List'' (1982) looked at the way the
Holocaust propelled one ordinary man
to heights of heroic action. And ''A Family Madness'' (1986)
used the plight of Byelorussia during
World War II as a backdrop for a tortured family epic. Now, in
his latest novel, ''To Asmara,'' he
focuses on the continuing conflict between the Ethiopian
Government and Eritrean secessionists.
In many respects, the book will remind readers of Hemingway's
''For Whom the Bell Tolls.'' Like
that earlier novel, ''To Asmara'' gives an account of a civil
war by an outsider sympathetic to one
side. Like that earlier novel, it has its hero fall in love
with a proud, heroic woman who has survived
all manner of awful tortures during the war. And like that
earlier novel, it reveals one of the hero's
cohorts to be a political traitor.
In the case of ''To Asmara,'' that hero is a journalist named
Darcy, who has left his native Australia
after a bitter separation from his wife. Darcy, it seems, is
one of those romantics who are sentimental
about lost causes and passionate about exotic, non-Western
cultures. Indeed, his marriage has
broken up over his failure to defend his wife - who has been
working with him as an adviser to an
aborigine community - before a local tribal council. The
Eritrean conflict appeals to his romantic
sensibility, and it provides him with a way of distancing
himself from his marital problems.
The other Westerners who will accompany Darcy on his
pilgrimage through Eritrea are similarly
outsiders, fleeing one sort of domestic difficulty or another.
Christine, a young Frenchwoman who
has recently lost her baby, has set off for Eritrea to search
for her father, a film maker named
Malmedy, who has left his family behind to devote himself to
documenting the Eritrean fight for
independence. Henry, a representative of a relief group called
Southern Unitarian Aid, has nearly
despaired of getting his Somalian fiancee, Petra, out of
Ethiopia. And Lady Julia, the widow of a
British peer, has journeyed to this war-torn country to
further the cause of women's rights - a cause
her missionary aunt died for many decades ago. Together, these
travelers are escorted to the front
lines of the war by a group of Eritrean rebels.
As he has done in the past, Mr. Keneally folds in a lot of
information with his narrative, giving us a
tiny history lesson on this nearly three- decade-long
struggle. We are given graphic illustrations of the
atrocities reportedly committed by the Marxist Addis Ababa
Government - in recent years Amnesty
International has cited that Government for the massacre of
civilians and other human rights
violations - and we are shown, up close, the effects of war
and famine on the country's population.
Though he's ostensibly a journalist, Darcy makes no secret of
how ''solemnly taken'' he is with the
Eritrean cause; and Mr. Keneally - who has dedicated this
volume to ''the brave Eritrean People's
Liberation Front'' - seems equally ardent in his sympathies.
The result is a didactic, and somewhat
labored fiction that lurches earnestly from scene to scene.
Many of the scenes in the Eritrean camp -
depicting crippled children, courageous survivors of land mine
accidents, and fiercely dedicated
soldiers - seem deliberately calculated to inspire sympathy in
the reader. In fact, as depicted by Mr.
Keneally, the rebels are almost uniformly polite, heroic and
brave.
There's Salim, ''a kind of Jefferson figure,'' a former
Government functionary who joined the Eritrean
rebels after Soviet intervention on the side of Ethiopia.
There's Neroyo, who has organized an
impressive series of mobile medical units that work just
behind the rebel troops to treat the
wounded. There's Fida, an Ethiopian prisoner of war, who joins
the rebels after learning of his
Government's use of napalm. And finally there's the beautiful
Amna, who survived a debilitating
Government-administered torture session, to escape and
continue fighting.
Though Darcy has fallen in love with her - he tries thinking
of some act of daring that might catch her
attention - Malmedy warns him that such a romance is doomed by
the facts of her past. ''No,'' he
tells Darcy, ''Do you know I tried to marry her! But we to
whom nothing has happened have no
commmon conversation with people like her. They did everything
to her. She cannot weep because
they crushed her tear ducts with a circle of rope.''
Such scenes in ''To Asmara'' are less moving than they might
be because neither Amna nor Darcy
ever really transcend their roles as symbols - of the martyred
freedom fighter and the naive observer
- to become completely realized individuals. Consequently,
their story remains a clumsily drawn
illustration of a historical situation rather than a fully
dramatized fiction.
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