FICTION:Although now living in Canada, this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award winner brings us firmly to the heart of his wartorn home city, writes Eileen Battersby
AS SOON AS you hear the bomb, you better pause and wait for the second. It will come. They always do. Rawi Hage's vivid, angry, at times existentialist 2008 Impac winner is about responding to a constant state of terror - the next shot, the next explosion, the next punch, the next smile.
Bassam is young, no longer a child, but not yet a man. His father is dead and his mother smokes most of the time and steals water from their neighbour's tank. Bassam's days are about hanging out in coffee shops and bars with George, his childhood friend and fellow thug on the make. Work is merely an inconsequential irritant that guarantees some cash, enough to pay for drinks, a cool shirt, cigarettes. Most everything else can be stolen. Why not? Or else a deal can be struck. These boys get up to all kinds of deals.
Together the two friends, Bassam a narrator who believes in graphic candour and George, speed about on George's motorbike, dicing with death; reacting, shouting, being alive. They may as well - as everyone in civil war-torn Beirut knows all it takes is a bomb blast, a speeding car, that man over there with the gun. Death is quick in Beirut.
Early in De Niro's Game, in one of many typical street scenes, a bomb falls and is quickly followed by another.
"I walked down the stairs and through the back alleys, guided by screams and the smell of powder and scattered stones. I found the blood beside a little girl . . . I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the girl's bleeding ribs . . . the girl's blood dripped on my fingers, down my thighs. I was bathing in blood. Blood is darker than red, smoother than silk; on your hand it is warm like warm water and soap . . . I shouted and called the little girl by her name, but my shirt was sucking up her blood; I could have squeezed it and filled the Red Sea and plunged my body in it, claimed it, walked its shore and sat in its sun."
Beirut, as evoked by Hage who is settled in Canada, is a heaving, world weary, decadent inferno; daily routine is perpetually stalked by the history of the past and the politics of the present. It is international and defeated, well picked over by anyone who has passed through over the centuries.
Bassam lives in a heightened state, his imagination ignites into dramatic, often extravagant images: "I climbed onto George's motorbike and sat behind him, and we drove down the main streets where bombs fell, where Saudi diplomats had once picked up French prostitutes, where ancient Greeks had danced, Romans had invaded, Persians had sharpened their swords, Mamluks had stolen the villagers' food, crusaders had eaten human flesh, and Turks had enslaved my grandmother."
His reactions are extreme, he grabs at women as if he has no control over his body. The sex is ugly, frenzied and disengaged "I pushed my hand inside her tight jeans . . .". He quickly terrifies and revolts the teenage Rana who orders him to stop mauling her. George has an aunt, a youthful woman in her mid-forties about whom Bassam often fantasies.
"Never married, flirtatious and voluptuous, she dressed in tight skirts, high heels, colourful makeup, and low-cut blouses that showed her generous cleavage jutting forward . . . I fantasized about her inviting me in for a coffee . . . kneeling in worship under my belly button . . ."
Dazed, disconnected, he has a crummy job, driving the winch at the port. His thoughts are of flight, escape, as he announces to George, "I am fleeing and leaving this land to its devils."
He wants to go to Rome, to Paris, away. Even at work the things he notices are the different serial numbers, Hebrew, English, Arabic, on the weapons they unload, the distant places the goods originate in. He is a dreamer, no doubt about that, at times his thoughts spiral into elaborate fantasy scenarios that are sexual yet also heroic. He is intensely aware of the moment.
Among the strengths of this aggressive, urgent narrative is Bassam's relationship with his mother, a woman caught forever with a cigarette hanging from her lips. It is a sublimely accurate characterisation, this nagging mother who steals water without ever dropping her cigarette. It is his mother who warns Bassam not to fool about with young Rana. "Do not ruin her future", she says before shouting: "Yeah, just like your father. He always left, and he kept on leaving . . ."
Hage is a testing writer, testing himself as much as his reader. He is determinedly literary and often moves into incantation, favouring litanies and lists. He is also sharp, focussed, immediate. But there is no denying that throughout the novel he falters into self-conscious over-written passages.
No, the novel isn't perfect, the lyricism is forced - at times spat out. And yet, for all of this, Bassam's narrative is scaldingly alive. Hage has a story to tell based on experiences that burn the eye and the soul, while the reader is left reeling. It is as if your brain has been so engaged, you need to ice it.
The relentless physicality of the narrative is over-whelming, even claustrophobic. For all the rawness, the sense of the narrator racing out of control, which is convincingly handled, Hage who shifts between the cryptic and the philosophical, is capable of changing the mood: "I contemplated the flies barred by the store's door, longing to come in. Only dust flew in and out as it pleased. Beirut is an ancient Roman city, I thought. There is a city buried under our feet. The Romans also turned to dust. When I opened the door to leave, the flies rushed in."
It is no coincidence that for all the violence generated by Bassam and his circumstances which ultimately assume the pace of a thriller, the novel he acquires by chance when asking for something to read while staying in a boarding house is Camus's L'Etranger.
The haziness of the opening sentences: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure" wander through his consciousness. Shadowy, unbalanced George commits himself politically, Bassam drifts, behaving increasingly obsessivly, haunted by phrases, fears and most of all, by the absurdity of everything.
De Niro's Game By Rawi Hage Old Street Publishing, 281pp, £11.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times