The EconomistMarch 14th 2020 Books & arts 771C
olum mccann’s new novel refers at
one point to the “Jerusalem Syndrome”:
the messianic delusions that “proximity to
the holy places” can induce in pilgrims to
the city. Foreign writers and artists often
display their own version of this mania. It
consists in ordering the divided peoples of
the Holy Land to recognise how much they
have in common (in history, heritage, cul-
ture, even genetics) and instructing them
to live in peace.
Irish-born but long resident in New
York, Mr McCann knows every pitfall that
awaits the moralising traveller keen to
swell the region’s “corny” and “trite” rhet-
oric “of justice, of kinship, of reconcilia-
tion”. From its mysterious title onwards,
the oblique storytelling of “Apeirogon”, his
seventh novel, shuns the conventions of
the high-minded outsider’s reportage. Yet,
for all his sophisticated artistry, the au-
thority of this work of fiction rests ulti-
mately on its truth.
Mr McCann did not invent the entwined
destinies of Bassam Aramin and Rami El-
hanan. Rather, their real, conjoined lives
inspired this “hybrid novel”, which weaves
documentary and imagination into its
toughly lyrical fabric. Both bereaved fa-
thers, the pair of friends decided that “the
only revenge is making peace”. Brought up
in Hebron, Mr Aramin was a Fatah militant
who served seven years in jail but soon set
out “to pit himself against the ignorance of
violence, including his own”. In 2007 an Is-
raeli soldier killed his ten-year-old daugh-
ter Abir with a rubber bullet as she bought
sweets in the West Bank town of Anata.
Mr Elhanan is an Israeli whose father, a
Holocaust survivor, immigrated from Hun-
gary, but whose mother’s family had lived
in Jerusalem for six generations. Hamas
terrorists killed his 13-year-old daughter
Smadar in 1997 in a suicide-bomb attack on
the city’s Ben Yehuda Street. But he pro-
gressed from viewing Palestinians as
threats from “the dark side of the moon” to
acknowledging “the equality of pain”. First
in Combatants for Peace (Mr Elhanan
fought in three of Israel’s wars), then in the
Parents Circle that brings together be-
reaved families from both sides, the duo
have sought through their activism to re-
place the clear lines of enmity with “the
tangle of knowing each other”.
Journalists and film-makers have told
their story before. Mr McCann, too, co-op-erated closely with the friends. “Apeiro-
gon”, though, wraps the facts of their jour-
neys, and their griefs, into an elliptical and
fragmentary narrative. It situates their
quest for hope within the art and landscape
of Israel-Palestine and the “smashed jig-
saw” of rival histories. “Geography here is
everything,” Mr McCann writes. His mo-
saic of 1,001 colourful, enigmatic para-
graphs range across the scenery of a mili-
tary occupation that stifles the West Bank
like “the rim of a tightening lung” and, for
Palestinians, “deprives you of tomorrow”.
The reader glimpses the men’s zigzag
route through loss into peacemaking via
vivid, jagged tesserae of prose. Meanwhile,
images of flight, flux and movement—in-
volving migratory birds, watercourses, art-
works, even weaponised drones—offer ahawk’s, or dove’s, eye view of the seething
cauldron that the novelised Mr Elhanan
calls a “condensed everywhere”.
An “apeirogon”, the geometric term that
becomes Mr McCann’s key metaphor, is a
shape “with a countably infinite number of
sides”. The patchwork pattern of this novel
matches the polyhedral complexity of the
pasts it evokes. With “one story becoming
another”, “Apeirogon” insists on “the sheer
simultaneity of all things”. The results are
frequently beautiful, sometimes baffling.
The imagery often dazzles, but plainer pas-
sages that inhabit the men’s minds as they
wrestle against rage and bitterness towards
an “ethic of reciprocity” have the greatest
emotional power. At the core of this fractal
fiction is a simple, radiant myth: “The hero
makes a friend of his enemy.” 7Fiction of realityBrothers in arms
Apeirogon.By Colum McCann. Random
House; 480 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; £18.99T
he blastsflung debris into the sky and
rucked the sea-floor like a rug. The flash
from the largest—which, at 15 megatons,
was 1,000 times stronger than the detona-
tion that flattened Hiroshima—was visible
in Okinawa, 2,600 miles away. Radiation
from its fallout was detected in cattle in
Tennessee. The atomic-bomb tests on the
Marshall Islands from 1946-58 were an
awesome display of American might, and
of mankind’s power to reshape the world.
Their effects lingered long after the
mushroom clouds dispersed. Rates of can-cer soared among islanders downwind of
the fallout. There were stillbirths and “jel-
lyfish babies” (children born without
bones, and skin so translucent their hearts
could be seen flickering within). Yet, as Da-
vid Farrier reports in his thoughtful book,
the full impact of this “carnival of atomic
energy” cannot yet be known. The half-life
of the plutonium-239 released in nuclear
reactions is 24,100 years—several times the
length of recorded history. In fact, Mr Farri-
er writes, those blasts will constitute one of
humanity’s most enduring signatures, leg-
ible “at both poles and on every continent,
in lake sediments and ice cores, in tree
rings and living tissues”.
In “Footprints” he asks what material
traces, or “future fossils”, will remain of
what is sometimes known as the Anthro-
pocene, the epoch in which people have
held sway over the environment. His ex-
plorations take him from Shanghai, a me-
gacity of 24m people, to the tomb-like hush
of a laboratory in Tasmania that analyses
Antarctic ice. He ranges from the deep past
to the far distant future to tell the story of
humankind’s lasting imprint.
Despite its sobering theme, Mr Farrier’s
prose glitters. His journey takes in marvels.
He meets a poet who aspires to encode
verse into thednaof Deinococcus radiodu-
rans, a hardy bacterium that is nearly un-
killable; inscribing its genome is an at-
tempt “not to preserve information but toFuture historiesFragments and ruins
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils.By
David Farrier.Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320
pages; $28. Fourth Estate; £16.99Blasts from the pastA journey through the lasting traces of human civilisation