Wednesday 10 October 2018

Beirut Hellfire Society


Now, the man told his son, you're sixteen – old enough to become a member of the Society. The Hellfire Society, the father added. He switched on the car radio, and drove towards the coast and then up into the mountains of Lebanon.


In the prologue to Beirut Hellfire Society, an undertaker introduces his teenaged son, Pavlov, to a secret crematorium in the mountains surrounding Beirut – burial is the only officially sanctioned method for cadaver disposal, although both the Christians and the Muslims of the city deny it to their outcasts – and as the book begins, it is several years later, the father is dead, and Pavlov is enlisted to take over the work of cremating the atheists, hedonists, homosexuals, and other “undesirables” of the community. Having grown up in a house beside the Christian cemetery, Pavlov has spent his entire life watching parades of mourners go by from an upper balcony, and as the city's civil war escalates (this is the 1970's) and as the priest leads an unending stream of mourners for dead militiamen to their gravesites, Pavlov starts to suffer from mounting nihilism: Just what is the point of this war? What is the point of life itself? Told in short, episodic chapters, we are introduced to a wide variety of characters – with only a couple of threads stretching throughout the whole book – and written in Rawi Hage's typically lyrical and engaging style, I immensely enjoyed this return to the world of Hage's knockout debut, De Niro's Game. I was struck by the short, quirky observations:
Women in black gowns dragged their ponderous heels on the unpaved road, and men in sombre colours shortened, with their breath, white cigarettes trapped between their scissor-like fingers and lead-filled teeth.
I was intrigued by the details that Pavlov observes from his balcony: pallbearers dancing with the coffins of unmarried young men to give them a combination wedding/funeral; the ironic dangers of having a funeral parade as bombs are falling all around; the dwindling availability of pallbearers as the young men die off, Christians emigrate, and family lines are extinguished. And I was enchanted by longer passages and their mixed imagery about the banality of constant warfare:
Poor terrestrial dead, Pavlov thought, miserable cadavers confined to their rectangular demarcation. They have to endure the crushing weight of the earth, and the bird's-eye-view of apathetic gravediggers pouring earth into their eyes. He hurried back home, lit a cigarette and stood on his balcony. He inhaled and exhaled with force, and bade farewell to the smoke on this day of light rain and blossoming trees and the shameless appearance of flowers, pink pirouettes exuberant with scent and colour that mingled with bullets falling from weapons in the hands of fighters wearing cheap white sneakers with green rubber soles made in China.
In the main part of the book, the stream of people with alternative beliefs and lifestyles who come to Pavlov's door to prearrange their own cremations demonstrates the Beirut of the time to have been a safe haven for intellectuals, Bohemians, and sexual adventurers. Yet in a modern day epilogue, when Pavlov's heir moves into the family home overlooking the Christian cemetery, the now Muslim-dominated neighbourhood isn't quite so tolerant of Westernised values. So what were all those young men fighting and dying for during Lebanon's civil war? This article in Maclean's points out the book's key inspiration from an interview with Rawi Hage:
In the epilogue, when the story moves briefly to the present, Beirut Hellfire Society’s underlying connective thread – a kind of geocultural determinism – becomes fully visible. Pavlov’s half-Swedish great-niece comes upon the scene and starts to morph into Pavlov. “Yes, it’s a story about families and lineages,” says Hage, “that asks how people are transformed by their geographies. How important is it to stay in one space? Maybe we should all become wanderers. I just don’t know.”
And based on that information, I reckon this is the key passage from the book itself:
These few left-over Christians in the Middle East should leave, the Bohemian said. They should leave this land and spread out all over the earth. The world is vast and these early converts are holding on, in vain, to their mythologies, religion, and a handful of picturesque valleys and mountains. Who and what are they fighting for? They should leave. Leave this country to the Muslims, and then the Muslims will leave it to someone else one day. I have never understood attachments to land and culture. Look at them, sliding one coffin after another into the pit! They wasted the little life they could have had elsewhere. They were never tolerated, and they tolerated no one. The Gods of these lands are cruel, jealous, petty, and archaic. These converts should leave and roam the planet...
There's plenty to think about here, and with scenes and language that consistently intrigued me, I found this rather non-traditional novel to be thoroughly captivating.


The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude
Patrick DeWitt: French Exit
Esi Edugyan: Washington Black
Sheila Heti: Motherhood
Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs
Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth
Kim Thúy: Vi
Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)
2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists 



*Won by Dear Evelyn


 The 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for English-language Fiction Finalists:

Zolitude by Paige Coope
Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage
The Red Word by Sarah Henstra
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

* Won by The Red Word. I think the GGs picked a really strong list this year and I am pleased that Henstra won.
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