THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
IMAGINARY PEOPLE IN A REAL WAR
Date: October 1, 1989, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7;
Page 1, Column 1; Book Review
Desk
Byline: By ROBERT STONE; Robert Stone is the author of the
novels ''Dog Soldiers,'' ''A Flag
for Sunrise'' and ''Children of Light.''
Lead: LEAD: TO ASMARA By Thomas Keneally. 290 pp. New York:
Warner Books. $18.95.
Text:
TO ASMARA By Thomas Keneally. 290 pp. New York: Warner Books.
$18.95.
Thomas Keneally's compelling new novel, ''To Asmara,'' is a
rare entity in contemporary fiction, a
work of advocacy and engagement that unhesitatingly takes
sides in one of the world's
longest-running and least understood wars. As the narrative
gets under way, a small band of
Westerners is proceeding across the high desert of Eritrea,
Ethiopia's starving, rebellious province on
the shore of the Red Sea. They are bound for the war zone. One
is a young Frenchwoman, whose
strange, affectless manner bespeaks some obscure psychic scar
and who bears the darkly evocative
name of Christine Malmedy. Another is a shifty, obstreperous
American, an Africa hand whose
angry cynicism seems beyond the persuasion of any allegiance.
There is an elderly Englishwoman
with a title and a double-barreled surname, the representative
of the Anti-Slavery Society, ''one of
the first of all kindly bodies to intrude in Africa's bitter
affairs'' and as such an ironic remnant of
colonialism. Finally, there is Timothy Darcy, an Australian
reporter on a story for The Times of
London.
Darcy is the principal narrator of ''To Asmara'' and its
central character. Haunted by lost loves and
causes, profoundly wounded by all he has cherished most, Darcy
is a man for deserts, a ranker in a
foreign legion of the spirit. He is one of those tentative,
self-despising dreamers drawn to the empty
quarters and violent margins of the West's known world, a
common breed of cat in contemporary
fiction as in contemporary life. Writers since Conrad's day
have been exploiting the collision of those
two classes of pale-skinned pilgrim in the tropics, the
obsessive believer and the burnt-out case, a
literary convention with quite a lot of hard reality behind
it.
In fact, all of these travelers to the front lines of this all
but invisible war have personal goals whose
pursuit links them with the fortunes of free Eritrea.
Christine has come to seek her father, a visionary
French film maker known to the Eritreans as Masihi, which
means ''He Who Expects the Messiah.''
Masihi, Roland Malmedy, is a driven romantic adventurer in the
tradition of T. E. Lawrence, a man
who has abandoned family, country and career to document the
Eritrean struggle. He has, as
someone says, taken the Eritrean People's Liberation Front for
his femme particuliere. Lady Julia
Ashmore-Smith is a colonial district commissioner's widow
turned feminist, brought back to Africa
by her crusade against the enormity of ''female
circumcision,'' the traditional genital mutilation of girl
children. The American, Mark Henry, has a mission that turns
out to be more devious and desperate
than anyone suspects. Darcy, the reporter, is in flight from
the ruin of his broken marriage and
youthful ideals, both of which have fallen victim in subtle
and unsubtle ways to the pressures of
sexual and racial conflict. Nevertheless, one of the flavors
he detects about the Horn of Africa is ''the
stench of simple ambition.'' He knows the opportunity to
witness a major E.P.L.F. operation against
the Ethiopian oppressor may give him the story of a lifetime.
Though his journalistic ambition is little more than a
function of his spiritual despair, the reporter
nourishes a secret spring of hope. As a young law graduate in
Australia, married to a strong-willed
Chinese-Australian colleague, Darcy had served with his wife
as a community advisor to tribal
aborigines in the desert west of Alice Springs, a location as
remote as possible from urban Australia.
That desert, Darcy's first, defeated him. Since then he has
covered the disasters of the modern
world, his capacity for love and hope traumatized almost to
the point of atrophy but alive at his core.
In this other desert, whose hard light and brutal realities he
recognizes at once, he will dare to act
again.
Thomas Keneally has always been a quietly passionate student
of the impulse toward love and light
in a fallen world, and in Tim Darcy he has brought to life a
complex and credible figure whose
impulses and responses engage and persuade. Most remarkable of
all, he has presented in his
description of the Eritrean struggle a vision of that good
fight many of us had long ago given up on
locating. The war changes the lives of all the Westerners in
''To Asmara.'' Young Christine, who
turns out to have been in a psychiatric hospital back in
Paris, finds her father, and with him finds
renewed order and purpose as his assistant on the front lines.
Lady Julia finds that the Eritreans,
liberated by their national effort, are doing away with the
tradition of female mutilation on their own
African terms. Everyone, however ironically, finds justice and
mercy.
The background will be fairly obscure to many readers who are
not students of Africa. Eritrea was
colonized in 1890 by the Italians, who ruled it for the next
51 years and used it in support of their
invasion of Ethiopia. With American backing, the Ethiopians
received it in 1952, in what was to be a
federal arrangement that would allow for some Eritrean
autonomy. The feudal Government of
Emperor Haile Selassie, however, proceeded to ignore these
guarantees. In the early 1960's,
Marxist-influenced Eritrean students began a movement for
national liberation, receiving some
assistance from Communist and Arab nationalist sources. In the
intervening years, the overthrow of
Haile Selassie by the pro-Soviet Government of Mengistu Haile
Mariam brought the Eritreans even
harsher domination, and the cynical shifting of superpower
alignments, in an area whose geography
curses it with great strategic importance, has left the
Eritreans on their own. They have carried on
alone, without significant support, even from other African
nations.
Nearly 10 years ago, Philip Caputo's excellent novel ''Horn of
Africa'' fictionalized some aspects of
the Eritrean war and, without mentioning Eritrea by name,
described in a memorable battle scene a
victory by rebels over a superior force of Ethiopian regulars.
Since then, the wars of northeastern
Africa have divided and compounded to the point of confusing
even the experts, and the
28-year-old Eritrean struggle, an epic in search of a poet,
vanished from the concerns of Western
fiction and even largely from the headlines. This is a
situation that ''To Asmara'' sets out to rectify; the
book's timeliness is reinforced by the fact that
representatives of the Eritrean People's Liberation
Front are meeting with Ethiopian officials at the Carter
Center in Atlanta as this review is being
written, in the hope of negotiating their land's independence.
Not since ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' has a book of such
sophistication, the work of a major
international novelist, spoken out so unambiguously on behalf
of an armed struggle. The enemy, the
Ethiopian Government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, is denounced as
embodying a level of cruelty far
beyond anything the Spanish Falangists ever brought to bear,
its socialist rhetoric seen as
hypocritical drivel and its East-bloc and Cuban support as
high-tech genocide carried out by
betrayers who first encouraged the Eritreans to rebel, then
turned napalm and cluster bombs on their
villages in the name of cold-war strategy. It must be said
that this indictment of the Mengistu regime
gains credibility from a number of recent reports, for example
the memoir ''Breakfast in Hell'' by Dr.
Myles F. Harris, an Australian physician who worked in
Ethiopia during the mid-1980's.
In preparing to write ''To Asmara,'' Mr. Keneally spent three
months in Eritrea, and if the Eritrean
People's Liberation Front that is depicted in his novel
corresponds to reality, it is an outfit that richly
deserves support. The novel explains and sets out to refute
the charges that the rebels have
augmented the effect of famine by attacking relief convoys. As
described here, the movement is one
that has reinforced its military struggle with a humane and
progressive ideology, furthering
comradeship between Christian and Moslem, the liberation of
women and universal education. Its
fighters, men and women serving on equal terms, have decent
and farsighted leaders who have made
schools and hospitals a priority in the areas they control.
Its prisoners are treated with exemplary
humanity. Some of Mr. Keneally's other works may display his
fictional methods with more literary
eclat, but both his wonderful sense of place and his
psychological subtlety are safely in evidence
here. Most arresting is the vision he offers readers of ''To
Asmara'': that of struggling Eritrea as
democracy's best hope in the region, an African beacon to the
world. 'I WATCHED THE SEATED
DEAD'
The graveyard at Orotta was unmarked and indistinguishable
from the surrounding terrain. A few
modest superstructures of clay and stone, oval in shape,
randomly studded with lumps of a white
marblelike stone taken from the hillsides, marked the place.
Even the funerary arts of Eritrea were
geared to be invisible from the air.
Among these plain memorials lay a wide grave which caught the
moon, now at its zenith. There were
few shadows. One other blanketed shape had been seated in the
pit, though there was space for a
dozen.
The diggers, a party of boys and girls in khaki, perhaps
artillerists from the mountaintops around,
stood quietly to one side with their shovels. The stretcher
bearers crouched, lifted Salim's niece in
her blanket off the litter, and lowered her down to two
soldiers who had jumped into the pit to
receive her.
The boys handled her with delicacy, I thought. . . . But then,
contrary to my earlier suspicions, there
was no ceremony to speak of. . . .
I watched the seated dead in the pit, leaning over toward each
other, supple shapes still, so recent
was their tragedy. No one made a sound. . . . I heard Salim at
my side intoning something in Arabic.
The artillerists . . . were moving off so soon to other work.
The stretcher bearers were already on
their way back toward the operating theaters.
Amna turned away from the grave and toward Salim and me. If I
expected to find tears in her eyes,
there were none. She said authoritatively, in her sharp-edged
English, ''It is certainly time for you to
go now.'' From ''To Asmara.'' 'I HAVE CONDISERABLE HOPE'
To Eritreans, Asmara is ''a holy capital,'' explained Thomas
Keneally in a recent telephone
conversation from his home in Sydney, Australia. And the
Western characters in his latest novel
come to have similar feelings about the place, as their
travels bring them closer and closer to the
battle lines that lie between them and the occupied city. For
each one of these people, the journey
toward Asmara has taken on symbolic proportions; it has become
a kind of personal quest.
For the young Frenchwoman, Christine Malmedy, Asmara means a
reunion with her long-lost father.
For Lady Julia Ashmore-Smith, a British feminist committed to
stopping the genital mutilation of
tribal girls, it is, said Mr. Keneally, ''the idea of the
liberation of women.'' And for Timothy Darcy, an
Australian reporter, the need to reach Asmara is both personal
and professional: to escape the pain
of a broken marriage and to investigate a potentially huge
story, the claims that convoys of food are
being destroyed on their way to starving people.
The author of more than 20 novels and a handful of plays that
he modestly dismisses as ''best
forgotten,'' the 53-year-old Mr. Keneally initially intended
to focus on the broader issue of world
hunger. But ''the more I got involved,'' he said, ''the more
people, politicians and aid workers said,
'the place you ought to go is Eritrea.' ''
''The message of this book is that famine is not an act of
God,'' he continued. ''It is not something
that simply befalls people the way certain corrupt governments
and officers of certain aid
organizations would make us believe. It is an act of politics,
and politics can be amended. There will
never be an end to the famine in the Horn of Africa until
there is an end to the war.''
Mr. Keneally hopes that his novel ''is readable enough to
generate a wave of concern in the West for
this virtually unreported war.'' For he believes that ''novels
have to be readable, not just political, to
do any good.''
''I have considerable hope for this revolution,'' Mr. Keneally
concluded. Being in Eritrea, ''you have
a sense of a new society emerging, of new possibilities.''
PAMELA CYTRYNBAUM
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