"At Night All Blood Is Black" by David Diop

 A Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the trenches of World War One witnesses the death of his best friend, his "more-than-brother". His terrible revenge tips him over the edge into a madness so extreme that it stands out even in the organised madness of the trenches.

Written in the first person and immersed in the protagonist's perspective, this beautifully written short novel makes use of repeated phrases (such as "more-than-brother", "la terre a personne, 'no-man's-land', as the captain says", and "God's truth") which make the simple narrative into a sort of epic poem.

It is structured with short chapters. There is a major turning point half-way through the novel so that this novel, despite seeming to ramble, is carefully structured.

The author's surname is Diop, which is also the name of the murdered friend, which resonates with the clever (and significant) twist at the end.

Selected quotes:

• "My stench is the stench of death. Death has the stench of the inside of the body turned outside its sacred vessel. In the open air, the inside of the body of any human being or animal becomes corrupted. From the richest man to the poorest, from the most beautiful woman to the ugliest, from the most feral animal to the most harmless, from the most powerful to the weakest." (Ch 3)
• "The rumour spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumour ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air." (Ch 6)
• "I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own." (Ch 8)
• "Here, there isn't any real sun. There's only a cold sun that doesn't dry anything. Mud remains mud. Blood never dries." (Ch 10)
• "That's war: it's when God lags behind the music of men, when he can't untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time." (Ch 12)
• "In war, when you have a problem with one of your soldiers, you get the enemy to kill him. It's more practical." (Ch 13)
• "You have to promise me that when you get back you'll stop mutilating the enemy, understood? You will content yourself with killing them, not mutilating them. The civilities of war forbid it." (Ch 13)
• "The captain is a devourer of souls. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers' lives. The captain is a devourer of souls." (Ch 13)
• "Mademoiselle Francois returned my smile right away and her gaze lingered on the middle of my body." (Ch 15)
• "Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created." (Ch 16)
• "He was as old as the immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky." (Ch 16)
• "God's truth, my body had experienced all sorts of great joys before Fary. I had felt its power in back-to-back wrestling matches. I had pushed it to the edges of its resistance in long races on the beach after swimming across the river. I had sprayed it with seawater beneath a sun as hot as hell, I had quenched it with cold water drawn from the deep wells of Gandiol after swinging a daba in my father's and Sire Diop's fields for hours and hours. God's truth, my body had known the pleasures of reaching the limits of its power, but never had anything been as powerful as Fary's warm, soft, and moist interior." (Ch 18)
• "My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger." (Ch 19)
• "If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well-known story, it stays invisible. The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at." (Ch 25)

A worthy winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize.

December 2021; 145 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other winners of the International Booker Prize can be found here. 

Other books about the First World War reviewed in this blog include

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Ice-Cream War by William Boyd
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

"An Ice Cream War" by William Boyd

 Two English brothers from the upper-classes, and an American, get caught up in a side-show of the First World War, the fighting between German and British East Africa. Of course the warring powers are both colonialists and both societies are alien invaders of African lands. But the overall message of this book is that human beings are tossed and turned by the tides of history. From the very start, one of the minor characters is described as shoulderless: "From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess." (2.2) As Felix realises: "it was futile to expect that life could in some way be controlled. But surely everyone had some vestigial power to influence things at his disposal?" (4.3) And as Temple reflects in the Epilogue: "Life doesn’t run on railway tracks. It doesn’t always go the way you expect." 

The blurb describes this as a black comedy. It certainly had overtones of Evelyn Waugh's comic novels (eg the appallingly racist and unfunny Black Mischief) and, like them, I did not find it very funny. Bizarre things happen, certainly, but at best I found them mildly amusing. Mea culpa perhaps. As I have said before in this blog, I don't get comic novels. I don't do surreal, either. The only thing I laughed at was the ludicrous conversations between Felix and Gilzean, who spoke broad, and broadly incomprehensible, Scots. I don't normally like untranslated foreign language in a novel but this was meant to puzzle, so it fitted.

It certainly doesn't have the biting anti-war anger and savage surreal humour of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It was much more subdued. Perhaps the names were significant: Felix was lucky and Charis had charm but I'm not sure how angelic Gabriel was.

So I treated it more or less as a normal novel.

It is told in the third person and the past tense from a multi-person perspective, head-hopping chapter by chapter. This enabled the reader to get into the head of the principal characters, mostly Felix, Charis, Gabriel, Liesl and Temple. Some of these characters are killed off before the end of the novel and none of them truly develop as characters in the conventional way of novels because fundamentally what happens to them occurs through the promptings of fate or some joker god, and in despite of their characters. This gives the book a strange un-novel-like feel. Heroes are supposed to be masters of their own fate. This lot aren't. It resembled, for me, The Iliad, another war nook in which the heroes are the playthings of the gods.

I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it. I found it quite heavy going at the start. I suppose one felt sorry for the gauche Felix and the innocent lovers Gabriel and Charis and I suppose all the characters were made harder by their experiences of war. Towards the end I was quite interested. But I never really invested emotionally in any character so the horror was not as horrific as it might otherwise have been. 

Selected quotes:

• "Wheech-Browning suddenly leapt four feet sideways leaving the two flies circling aimlessly in the space he had occupied a second before. It took them a moment to find him again." (2.1)
• "He was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it." (2.2)
• "There was a delicate spattering sound as bits of expressed brain hit the leaves of the bushes behind the man." (2.6)
• "Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn’t possess." (2.6)
• "Nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events." (2.6)
• "The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this arid plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing." (2.12)
• "Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes – BE2 Cs – which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa." (2.12)
• "There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once." (2.13)
• "A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside." (2.15)
• "It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring." (2.15)
• "The sense of his own responsibility, so successfully evaded for so many months, hit him with full force." (2.17)
• "The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models." (3.1)
• "There was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height." (3.1)
• "His ludicrous ‘quest’ had fizzled out in the mud of Kibongo, his high ideals and passionate aspirations replaced by grumbles about the damp and endless speculation about what to eat." (3.2)
• "What kind of a war was this? he demanded angrily to himself. No enemy in sight, your men slowly being starved to death, guarding a huddle of grass huts in the middle of a sodden jungle?" (3.2)
• "He was full of retrospective wisdom, twenty-twenty vision as far as his hindsight was concerned." (4.3)

October 2021

This novel was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982.

Also by this author: Waiting for Sunshine and Trio

Also set during the world war one fighting in East Africa: by Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gonfur

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Raw material" by Alan Sillitoe

Another book of several parts. Sillitoe descriptions of some of the characters in his family history alternate with speculations on what truth means for a writer and a discussion of how, in his eyes, the class-bound generalship of the First World War led to war crimes such as the execution of deserters and the slaughter of the trenches. Mr Sillitoe's furiously working-class perspective makes a refreshing change from the suffocating middle-classness of most of English writing.

Great writing:

• "Each incident ... has more than one version, and so certain parts of this book are closer to a novel than others." (p 16)
• "If Burton did remember his youth it was only so that he could put the experience of it to such good use that his children stood little chance of enjoying their own in his presence." (p 23)
• "To cause someone to be born is to send them alone into the dark. Thus the most excruciating guilt comes with having given life to a child." (p 25)
• "Life is meagre with some people." (p 45)
• "In war it is the worst of a country that persuade the best men to die. It is easier to deceive the best than the worst. But if it is true that the best men are fools and go with ease, while the worst are cunning and find it easy to hold back, what else can war be but an utterly sure method of destroying a country?" (p 120)
• "It was a common though jocular belief among British soldiers during the Great War that their government had to pay rent to the French for the land the trenches were dug on." (p 123 - 124)
• "A man can hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with tears in his eyes, then go outside and club someone with his rifle butt." (p 134)
• "Man chooses ... though God disputes his right to it." (p 137)
• "You can't bring back history. You can't remake the past ... You can't alter the present either, even though you know that one day that also will be history - from the viewpoint of the future." (p 141)
• "Beware of the man who says no. He'll enslave you as he too has been enslaved. Look out for a man who continually shouts yes. He'll destroy you before doing away with himself." (p 188)

Too much speculation about truth but his sympathetic treatment of the working class and his angry perspective on the Great War make this a very valuable counter-blast to the complacent presumptions of today. Septmeber 2018; 189 pages

"The secret rooms" by Catherine Bailey

In 1940, John, 9th Duke of Rutland, died alone in a draughty room off the servants' quarters of Belvoir Castle, a room in which he had lived and worked alone, more or less continuously, for two years. The rooms were then sealed for sixty years.

When Catherine Bailey gained access to them, to work on a history of the First World War, she discovered that John had been assembling, or perhaps dissembling, the family archives. Here were copies of all their letters. Except there were three missing periods within the records. From the evidence of the butterfly clips that held packets of letters together, the evidence for these periods had been removed by John, while he was compiling the archives.

The first relates to a time when John was eight and his elder brother died.

The second relates to 1909, when John was a reluctant diplomat in Rome.

The third relates to a period between July and December 1915 when John was in the British Army during the First World War. The third missing period corresponds exactly to the time when John's war diary suddenly goes blank.

What were the secrets hidden by the missing evidence? Were they all linked?

The start of this book reads like the most exciting thriller, perhaps a classic Robert Goddard such as Long time coming or Blood count. I am a fan of this genre. Bailey adds neat touches: she jumps around in time between the story of John and the story of her researches; her prose is sparse and matter-of-fact as if the mystery is quite the opposite; there is the wonderful moment when she leaves the allegedly haunted room in which the Duke died in search of a coffee, only to be surprised by a woman "in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid."

I could scarcely read this book fast enough. However, as we approach the end the story is marred by the endless quotations from family letters. Most of these letters help to add a little extra to the puzzle but they also contain many trivial details that are not necessary. In short, she could have shortened it.

And in the end, not all the details are resolved. Thus is real life unlike a thriller but it is unsatisfactory although it gives one the sense of enduring mystery and the hope that someone one day might resolve the remaining puzzles.

Nevertheless, this was a cracking read. May 2013; 425 pages