A YOUNG RUSSIAN revolutionary in captivity somewhere along the border between Angola and Zaire during the colonial war attempts to steal a pen from a corpse on the prison floor, writes Fiona McCann.
The Russian is Andreï Makine's unnamed narrator, who, fittingly, comes to write the story of this man he takes for dead, a wounded Angolan named Elias Almeida. Over the course of their night in co-captivity, Almeida and his pen-thieving companion are witness to horrifying atrocities, all the while at the mercy of a drunken, war-orphaned boy who sporadically trains his gun on them. It is only Almeida's narrative which brings relief from the violence unfolding around the two men, only the story that keeps the listener alive. "He could have promised me a swift rescue by a Cuban commando squad the next morning. Or a stoical, heroic end and survival in the memory of others . . . But none of this would have liberated me from fear as completely as did his slow, calm narrative."
What kind of narrative could have such powers of distraction? A story of love, recalled in careful detail by an Angolan man who from an early age was exposed to deprivation, with a father absented by guerilla warfare and a mother reduced to prostitution to feed her child. Almeida's childhood is defined by poverty and violence, yet neither make as profound a mark on the young boy as his mother's love. It is her death at the hands of the Portuguese colonisers that starts Almeida on a political journey which leads, via the eastern Congo and Cuba, to Russia. In his own words, he joined the revolution "so that there would not be a woman's slender fragile collarbone, smashed by a soldier's boot".
In Russia he meets Anna, who takes him home with her to her village in Siberia in a journey which opens his heart to the terrifying possibilities of love and places him among those now living on the other side of the revolution he is hoping to bring home. This love, shared with Anna on a long train trip, is what imbues Almeida with a dignity that raises him above the sordid commodifications of war.
Time and again the revolution comes up against its biggest obstacle, human nature, yet Almeida's faith in the possibility of a better world is unswerving. Even when its icon, Che Guevara, who appears briefly as a character in the book, abandons those he claimed to have come to save, Almeida remains, fortified by an ambition to "change the way we love".
In a book that details with heartbreaking clarity mankind's shortcomings, his greedy appetites and easy faithlessness, Makine's gift is in the subtle revelation that in the end, the world that Almeida is fighting for already exists, side by side with the one he is hoping to replace. It exists in the quotidian happiness of the people the revolution claims to wish to liberate, and in Anna's selfless and enduring love for him that leads her to sacrifice her own happiness for his treasured cause.
In this tender translation by Geoffrey Strachan, Siberian-born Andreï Makine elucidates big ideas with poetic sensitivity and a series of haunting vignettes that bring them into sharp focus. In his battles with history, Almeida comes out victorious, carried above its circular chronologies by his tenacious grip on a timeless emotion. Though the time jumps can be jarring, there is a fine line drawn between Africa's colonial past and a conference hall in the present where the fat-necked and fawning expound on African Life Stories in Literature. The narrator's cynicism is heavy on the page, but he requires that we connect the dots, and see the picture in its entirety, depriving the reader of "the satisfaction of remaining blind" as he reminds us of the human cost of the wars that continue to blight the African continent.
But this is Almeida's story, and Makine gives him the final scene, his last act of heroism an echo of the book's title and a reminder of the "essential thing" its protagonist recognises as missing from the world of war: human love. As its power is revealed to him in the curve of his mother's arm around him, and in a woman's hand in his amid the snowdrifts, Almeida's vision is clear: "All that was needed was to say this, to get other people to understand this." In Human Love, his tenth novel, Andreï Makine makes an eloquent case.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist
Human Love By Andreï Makine. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan Sceptre, 249pp. £12.99