Fiction: Imagine being buried alive beneath the desert, in tiny grave-like cells. It is dark. The only sounds consist of half-hearted conversations and the slow release of dying. There is also the silence, the silence of the dead, writes Eileen Battersby.
Imagine what it is like "there, in the depths of the humid earth, in that tomb smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice and his reason".
Just as there is darkness and silence and death in that grave, there is also madness because, as the narrator of Tahar Ben Jelloun's magisterial book, This Blinding Absence of Light, argues: "What good was reason there, in our graves? I mean where we had laid in the earth, left with a hole so we could breathe, so we could live for enough time, for enough nights to pay for our mistake, left with . . . a death that was to take its time."
Nothing can begin to describe the horror of this book, which is not quite a novel, not quite a memoir, but a recollection told to the novelist and shaped by him through the evidence of one survivor into an unforgettable testimony.
Be aware that this imprisonment was not perpetrated during the Middle Ages. It was devised by King Hassan II of Morocco in 1971. His was a barbaric revenge, the placing of 50 men, and their guards, into this most grotesque of death camps, a series of graves in the desert. Yet neither revenge nor recrimination dominate the story itself, a shameful chapter in Moroccan history. Instead the account is filtered through an almost dream-like, poetic sensibility of surreal beauty. How much of this belongs to the survivor and how much to Ben Jelloun is difficult to say. The result is a story that creeps up on the reader, slowly gathering its strength to become a work of incredible power. Subtle, never angry or harsh, it develops into an act of detached observation.
The central character and narrator is the son of a powerful man, a handsome, amusing individual who was well-placed at court but proved a dishonourable husband and a worthless parent. When the narrator, a junior officer, is arrested and imprisoned for his role in an attempted military coup his father promptly disowns him and has no intention of pleading for mercy on his behalf.
Initially, the emphasis is on the daily suffering, the routine agony of living in foul conditions, of becoming so weakened by poor food that the very act of eating becomes a torture and the need to empty one's bowels a torment. Fear and terror are the constant reality. Men scream with pain and weep for the release of death. Prisoners die, their bodies eaten from the inside out by insects and vermin. In the midst of the horrible details of their days, which merge into one endless night of horror, emerge snapshots of the world they once knew.
Stories help keep some of them alive, even sane. The narrator recalls books he has read and movies he has seen, and recounts them to his fellow prisoners. Not surprisingly, Camus's classic The Outsider becomes a central text, a type of mantra. To himself, however, the narrator imagines the letter he would write to his mother:
Oh, Mama, I feel that you are sad. Tell yourself that I am travelling, discovering an unfathomable world, discovering myself, learning with each passing day what you've made of me . . . I'm deeply sorry for the pain I've caused you by my involvement in this affair. But, as you can guess, no one consulted the cadets and junior officers about it . . . we followed our leaders."
In a most telling footnote, he adds: "I admit I was looking for my father. I'll never know whether it was to save him from that massacre or to shoot him."
In time, the narrator feels so ill he becomes "a storyteller full of holes, no longer able to play my part". This is a world in which an actual burial is a celebration, as at least the survivors out into the daylight. But even this privilege is taken away. Yet there are moments of bizarre joy, such as when a bird from the outside world, "fallen from the sky, like a message or a mistake" slips into the central air-shaft and lands "into the silence of our dense darkness".
The narrator, who never wallows in self-pity, describes quite matter-of-factly his loss of memory of his own face. When he finally sees his face in a mirror after his release, he doesn't recognise the aged ghost who stares back at him.
There are also moments of unexpected humour. Above all, though, this shocking, brutal and defiantly beautiful book is both a celebration of, and witness to, the miracle of survival.
After some 20 years of hell and the determined efforts of outside forces, such as Amnesty International, the prisoners are saved - or, at least, those who are still alive are freed. A deeply sinister touch is the care the authorities take in repairing the survivors before reintroducing them to society. This is their story, or rather the story of how some men can defeat the brutality of other men.
Shortlisted earlier this week for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, This Blinding Absence of Light may not be a novel, but it did require an artist of immense humanity to take the facts and one man's account, and shape them all into one of the most important, and humbling, books any of us will ever read.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
This Blinding Absence of Light. By Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale, The New Press, 195pp. $22.95