FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews CockroachBy Rawi Hage Hamish Hamilton, 305pp, £14.99
NO, IT’S not the greatest of titles. But the telling headline “Winner of the 2008 International Impac Dublin Literary Award for De Niro’s Game” across the top of the cover might help deflect it. Within a year of winning the world’s richest prize for a single book, Beirut-born, Montreal-based Rawi Hage has published a second novel shaped by rage and cunning and an obvious deference to the Western literary canon.
In many ways resembling De Niro’s Game, in its anger, its urgency and quasi-existentialist thrust, Cockroach was only a few months shy of publication in Canada last year when Hage was in Dublin accepting the Impac award. There is no doubting its confidence, the narrative gives the impression of an author having been purged of the story he had to tell in his first book; this time he is making a story based on his awareness of an ongoing hell in his native country and what happens when people attempt to flee that legacy.
The narrator is a petty thief, now living in a cold northern country, obviously Canada, very different from his hot, troubled homeland. As the book opens he is considering returning to his therapy sessions. In the first paragraph he is contemplating his feelings for a girl named Shohreh, in the second he is describing what happens when he sees a woman: “. . .I feel my teeth getting thinner, longer, pointed. My back hunches and my forehead sprouts two antennae that sway in the air, flagging a need for attention. I want to crawl under the feet of the women I meet and admire from below their upright posture, their delicate ankles. I also feel repulsed – not embarrassed, but repulsed – by slimy feelings of cunning and need. It is a bizarre mix of emotions and instinct that comes over me, compelling me to approach these women like a hunchback in the presence of schoolgirls.”
Rawi Hage, a celebrated visual artist and photographer before he ever sat down to write, has no difficulty in expressing complex emotions. His narrator is complex, half-poet, half-thug, but the thug part is half-hearted, more like a confused boy.
His thoughts wander through his immediate situation, that of starving and being resentful of the musician who owes him money, while the darker sections of his mind revisit his memories. All of this is prompted by the offbeat sessions with Genevieve, a therapist, with a line of laid-back enquiry that would fit neatly in the script of most episodes of Gray’s Anatomy. Curiosity sustains the narrative; the therapist is interested in the narrator’s problems, so is the reader although the narrative is almost like a camera moving between long-shots and close-ups, albeit with nothing in between.
It is a strange book; on the one hand Hage is trapped under the weight of the classic narratives he has read. The cockroach image obviously nods self-consciously to Kafka, there are also echoes of Dostoyevsky’s underground man and Hamsun’s Hunger. Camus stalks the pages. Even stronger is the similarity to Bret Eastern Ellis’s under rated American Psycho which was published in 1990 to a mixed response, with many of the attacks being ill-considered.
So it is fair to concede that Cockroach is not particularly original. Not for a moment does this narrator succeed in convincing the reader that he is a cockroach, or that he even thinks he is one. What we do grasp is the torment. The image of a cockroach is a metaphor too far. Hage writes in a determinedly literary language, it is also worth noting that the English he writes in is his third language, his first is Arabic, his second is French. His prose is theatrical and vivid; every so often he strikes a note of alarming truth. For such moments the journey is worth taking.
Late in the story the narrator is conversing with his lover, Shohreh, an Iranian who has experienced abuse. “After I was jailed and tortured, men all looked like beasts to me. Are you shocked?” The narrator’s reply is predictable, given everything that has already happened. “No, not at all. Nothing about humans shocks me. But then, I am only half human.”
While the cockroach theme is awkward, the litany of horrors perpetrated against the various characters is all too believable. It is a violent book, sexual and not really as funny as Hage has described it.
Instead it ripples with horrible ironies. The rage which sustains it could well distance a reader; it may also serve to draw one in. But the book is also about guilt and failure, the narrator has chosen an insect as his alter ego because of his failure to act at a moment which could have prevented the death of his sister. All of this filters out through the course of the therapy sessions, during which he admits to regretting his greed.
“Aren’t all creatures greedy?” asks the therapist. The narrator disagrees. “No, doctor. Other creatures only take what they need. That is not greed.”
It is interesting to see how Hage places his cast of immigrant characters in a new society and also how they conduct themselves within it. Acting almost as the overseer is the therapist, as wary as she is curious.
Cockroach has already won a major literary prize in Canada, following the daunting pattern of triumphs achieved by De Niro’s Game which won all in its way. For readers here, it is interesting to see the next book from an Impac winner. De Niro’s Game was set largely in Beirut and was fraught with the tensions of the situation and the contrasting attitudes towards escape as expressed by the two young protagonists. Although written before the Impac result, that outcome has ensured this novel of an audience.
All truths surface in the end, however circuitous their route. If the technique is derivative and too exact, Hage does bring passion, daring and candour to the telling of several stories converging in a communal experience. His narrator’s personal odyssey towards regret and lamentation articulates a wider despair.
Cockroach is not quite a great novel but it is a bold performance in which most of the demons are literary ones.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times