Love and death in the Congo

For readers of a certain age the name of Patrice Lumumba retains resonances. Lumumba: his square, dark-rimmed spectacles, his long, noble face, the elected leader who became for the liberal West both martyr and icon. The places: Stanleyville, Leopoldville, Katanga. The tribes of the Lulua and the Baluba. Tshombe.

In Ronan Bennett's novel the year is 1959. James Gillespie, Irish writer and sometime journalist, follows his lover, Ines, an Italian journalist, to the Belgian Congo. Ines's passionate support for scorned idealists makes her Lumumba's natural ally. Gillespie enters a collapsing colonial world where American financial interests shamelessly manipulate for their own ends the greed of emerging Congolese politicians.

Gillespie, a realist, can never, in truth, be the whole man of passion and commitment that Ines, a dreamer of great dreams, demands - but neither can any man. After Leopoldville there will be Saigon for Ines, then Belfast. Like a fierce, exotic shrub, she can only endure and renew through regular self-conflagration.

The men Ines attracts to herself are, like Gillespie, catastrophists - a word borrowed from the Italian catastrofista, which apparently refers to people who are forever drawn to the insoluble. One imagines that all those who love Ines, herself something of a catastrophist, are left with just the ashes of her memory and a grief that never heals.

The key to this love story, of course, is not Ines but Gillespie, its first-person narrator. A middle-aged man - forty, I think - Gillespie is a self-agonising, introspective loner, a man destined to be alone and apart. But his writer's detachment from the grist of life is too self-conscious, too undergraduate to permit the reader to regard him with any more than a curious respect. Upon seeing a child being brutalised by a soldier, Gillespie starts thinking of Ruskin: "Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the colour of his lips." Although Gillespie is aware that this Lit. Hist. Soc. approach to life has serious consequences, he is unable to escape from it.

As the Congo gains independence and descends into chaos, as Lumumba, the elected prime minister, flees for his life before the puppet factions of American and Belgian capitalists, Ines becomes ever more subsumed into Lumumba's circle and takes Auguste, a young Lumumba supporter, as a lover. There is a tragic inevitability in all of this for Gillespie. As Lumumba's power fades, so does Ines's love for her Irish writer. The colonists flee the Congo, selling their Mercedes cars for petty cash. Ines will stay to the bitter end, and so will Gillespie in a futile attempt to win her back.

The narrative then turns to Ireland, to Gillespie's own past, as he attempts to illustrate for us why he is the man he is, why the harsh realities of his past refuse to let him live the dream. There is reference to his demobbing, to "my war", in a bid to tack on a deep past to a man who, by this stage, the reader already sufficiently accepts. We don't need this detour into Gillespie's family closet in order to believe his actions; Bennett has already achieved our understanding and some other means must have been possible to check the pace before unfolding the memorable finale.

Bennett's feat of imagination is considerable and he writes with both intimacy and urgency. The Congo of 1960 with its ostrich-like colonists who cannot see what is so plain to the rest of the world, its gullible native population who believe that the very dead will rise with the coming of independence, its crazy, random cruelty and death, are all vividly evoked. Unfolding a love story against this background was a gamble that handsomely succeeds.

Peter Cunningham's new novel, Consequences of the Heart, will be published in October

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