THE JAIL SHUT DOWN AND IN CELL 73 they found papers: letters on blue paper to a political prisoner from his lover. That is the notion of John Berger's Man Booker long-listed novel: a woman writing to breathe some life, the life of everyday, into the
two square metres of a solitary cell. She plays a lot of canasta which, Berger hints, might not mean cards: it might mean revolution.
A'ida gives her lover memories of flying, of the taste of blackcurrants; she mentions names they obviously both know, and in the letters she never sent she can spell out actions and plots. She puts down on paper the ache and pain of missing him, but also the detail of running a store, saving a man's life, caring for someone else's cat. She is pushing a whole life and love through the bars.
At its finest, which is very fine indeed, there's a rawness, an impatience under the perfectly cadenced words. A man goes back to his ruined house and sweeps and sweeps and sweeps; prisoners take to barking for the sake of owning the silence when they stop; a chair has to be repaired, and it is repaired in paragraphs which are themselves a perfect piece of craft; a woman left alone happens twice on dogs screwing, and weeps; she remembers how she first met her lover, she was carrying a filthy car battery, he was welding in a garage pit. For pages at a time, you're short of breath, close to tears and close to fury for the brute cruelty that makes these letters necessary...
But most of this book has a more rehearsed feel, a sense that its heart belongs in the world of words and not with people or their pains: and the problems start with a simple question. Where are we?
Maybe it's some Palestine of the soul, or an Iraq: there are Apache helicopters overhead, women form blockades to stop Humvees as well as tanks (so General Motors is on the wrong side, again), there is sporadic mortar fire and a sense of things not working because they have been quite deliberately broken. But things are never quite specific.
At the back and front of the book are two fine, solemn portraits: a woman and a man, from the Fayoum paintings that Coptic Christians put over the faces of their mummified dead so they would always be known. This insists on the individuality of the woman writing letters, and her lover in jail, and it also seems to place them: in Egypt, in a minority. But somehow you get the feeling that if Xavier, the jailed insurgent, could write back, he'd have to address the letters to A'ida, care of The Struggle. And nobody would know exactly where to deliver them.
She sometimes calls him companero, a comrade from the Spanish-speaking struggles. She sometimes calls him Kanadim (in Turkish) or Habibi (which is Arabic) or soplete, which is Spanish for a blowtorch, or else Ya Nour, a loving phrase from an Egyptian belly-dancing song. She cooks with molokhiyya, a mintish leaf that isn't common outside Egypt, but the cities she most often mentions are in Iran (and sometimes in the Bible): Tarsa and Shushan.
Xavier remembers a flight over the town of Sennacherib, whose name is more famous as that of a person who killed Jews, on the way to Haserof, which is very close to the Hebrew for dwelling. And it did cross my mind when A'ida crosses a district called the "Arsehole of the Wind" that Berger might be half-remembering "le cul du vent", a remote mountain place not far from his Mont Blanc home.
His range of reference is vast (although if you value the remarkable Inuit poet Panegoosho enough to quote a poem, something most of us resist, it would be a courtesy to get her gender right). He has the authority and experience to see continuity between situations, cultures, struggles. But there is a danger in this: sometimes he just averages out the world.
We're shown the notes Xavier makes on the back of his lover's letters: political mini-sermons or maybe some kind of Marxisant litany, a bit of Hugo Chavez on how America spreads poverty in the name of Freedom, quite a lot about Third World wages, the way the whole neoliberal world is becoming a Nowhere because no place is allowed to be Anywhere in particular any more.
For a moment, you reckon this has to do with another sermon: on the death of the duality between mind and body, our new knowledge, as Berger sees it, that the body also thinks and the mind is not simply its managing director. Perhaps the point is that the warm, dirty mess of living and the fine polished abstract principles are indeed two sides of the same paper.
But as you read on, you are likely to be less kind.
A'ida has also served time, she says, so the risks are real; but the insurgency isn't. It sounds like a state of mind you could adopt at a North London dinner party or even the French Alps; the roots of the "war on terrorism", where people are just collateral damage in the war on an abstract noun, run deep in the mindset that set out to shoot up imperialism or globalisation. Xavier pulls his cracker mottos from the disadvantaged of the globe, but the armed struggle seems to be about bombing people to show how right-thinking you are.
This is alarming, and a tad narcissistic, given that those most likely to suffer from the bombs and plots are the ones the insurgents claim to be saving. And without a particular cause, set in this generalised place, insurgency becomes just one more righteous commodity – like art, whose status as a commodity Berger has analysed with such exact brilliance.
Now Berger is a man who writes many kinds of story – fiction and factual – but sometimes his sense of observed reality, intermittently both a great poet and a great reporter, simply does not support the kind of story he wants to tell; so it withers in the reading.
He's faced this problem before. In his trilogy about peasant life, there's a novel which is one of the finest written last century: Pig Earth, about the feelings and hurts and schemes of a village, exactly invented (or perhaps exactly observed; Berger went to live in a small village in the French Alps before he wrote). Nothing about it is unpolitical, but it isn't a book of slogans. But, in the same trilogy, the last book, Lilac and Flag, is about an abstraction: migration, from a vague countryside to a generalised city called Troy. You can't easily make stories, or even meditations out of something so vague.
From A to X has passages of tooth-grinding banality: a schoolteacher's philosophy. We're told at length how the mind/body duality is out of date – take that, Descartes – and "mothers literate or illiterate can take everything" and the young "know more vividly and intensely and accurately than anyone else", which we might doubt. We're told the answer to the abuse of great abstractions like democracy is "the evening language of the poor" – whatever that is when it's not being tastefully embroidered on a page.
Indeed, this is an oddly conservative book about resistance and revolt. Berger writes, beautifully, of an embroidered cushion and the brightness of the coloured threads on the wrong side of the cloth; and he does sometimes seem to be embroidering himself, banners for the parade, an elaborate right-thinking, right-on sampler, a book of maxims. But maxims, like emblems drawn to tell a moral tale, work only if you already know the moral.
You see the problem: such a book can never surprise, only confirm, and there was a time when Berger – as critic, as novelist, as essayist – could be wonderfully, sometimes painfully, surprising. We can only hope that, as a few extraordinary pages here suggest, that time is not over yet.
The full article contains 1375 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
