The myth of the heroic in war literature has been gradually replaced by the story of individuals caught up in impossible situations. Humanity interests novelists more than patriotism, and while many, arguably too many, novelists have used the Holocaust as a narrative device, often in fiction of mediocre quality war remains a compelling theme.
Dominique Sigaud's Somewhere in a Desert (trans. Frank Wynne, Phoenix House, £14.99 in UK) is tense and elegiac. At times it catches the mood of a surreal poetic dream, yet is never forced. Already the winner of six literary prizes in France, this slim, profound and original novel set in the aftermath of the Gulf War seems poised for major international success.
Stark images of death and destruction serve as a prologue in a narrative which moves from the general to the individual. "They sit in the shadows of their burned-out tanks, others stand or lie in the sand. They stare into the sun, they look at nothing else, or at nothing at all." Without descending to polemic, Siguad evokes the moral defeat and utter hopelessness of war through a prose of subtle lyricism.
Survivors are described as lost souls. "The young pace up and down, expressionless; they cannot bring themselves to look at the old soldiers, at these men who could be their fathers, for fear of the resignation, of the disgust they may find in their eyes." The soldiers ask themselves "why they should die when their deaths would mean nothing?"
Her approach is cinematic, and often deliberately cryptic. "The war was over. In the middle of the desert a man lay dead." The focus shifts from men devastated by war to that of Ali ben Fakr, an ordinary Iraqi citizen going about his daily life. For him, the war has been an irritant. But he is the one who finds the solitary soldier: "Arms outstretched, the body of the man was turned towards the sun. He seemed to be more asleep than dead: his lips fixed in a half-smile, his eyes sometimes glittering in the sun and seeming to bring his face to life, though he had been lying here for days."
For a while it seems the dead man is the presiding intelligence of the novel. He is the spokesman on the folly of war, and addresses the living, appearing to change the way they think. Pilgrim-like, the local people set off to see the dead soldier for themselves. It is interesting that Ali, long-established as the local story teller, is the person who introduces his community to this foreigner discovered by accident. As he watches the dead body, Ali becomes aware of his own death. He tries to close the dead man's eyes. "It was the reflex, the gesture of the living to the dead, a sign to send the man into eternity; a way of drawing a line between the war and the peace." But Ali experiences doubts; "closing the man's eyes would cut him off for ever from the world where he still lay, peacefully; it would be like killing him".
It is an extraordinary sequence, a living man overwhelmed by fellowship for a dead stranger. Sigaud has been well served by a translator alert to the narrative's subtle mood shifts. As more people become aware of the dead man, the attitude of the villagers towards the war alters. Ali's young wife also visits the corpse and is later joined in her vigil by her friends.
Through a long week, the peaceful corpse speaks about his life and considers his actions: "He laughed at who he was and who he might have been, at the fury and carnage of men." Such is the author's deft understatement, there is nothing extreme or far-fetched about the dead man's monologues
"On the eighth night the women knew this would be the last; the soldier's face had hardened and he stuttered and fumbled for words . . . he said all the things he had held back, his last fears, his final wishes, then he was silent." Having performed the function of symbolic story teller as penitent, the dead soldier then acquires a life through the grief of his widow. This unfolds through a series of letters to his wife, some of which she receives before his death, others she reads later. Central to the novel and to his wife's understanding of the events is the fact that the soldier, John Miller is not a war hero, but merely a man who had had enough and walked away.
As Miller's death unfolds and appears to find a resolution, another man, a French officer, begins to reassess his own life. Life and death, love and loneliness all act as foils to the theme of war.
Sigaud impresses on many levels. Somewhere in a Desert acts as a metaphor for many things. It is a philosophical, even spiritual, meditation on existence, disengagement and the fear of death, particularly the futility of the random death caused by war; it is also a love story.
Above all it examines the myth, reality and multiple betrayals of war. Far more evocative of Remarque's classic All Quiet on the Western Front than of Ondaatje's The Engish Patient, it is a beautiful, hauntingly assured performance.
