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Amber Stephan Collishaw Sceptre, 311pp This review first appeared in Third Way, October 2004.
"We may be through with the past," as the film Magnolia says, "but the past is not through with us." Collishaw's second novel, like his acclaimed debut The Last Girl, explores the dangers of burying history, both as individuals and as a people. The past can be denied but not escaped; if acknowledged it can be learned from, perhaps healed. Can it even be redeemed? Antanas is a Lithuanian who fought in the Russian war in Afghanistan. For years his loveable comrade in arms Vassily has helped him forget his guilt and fear and loss, teaching him to work amber. But with nightmares, alcoholism and a family on the edge of breakdown, the past has not forgotten him. When Vassily dies, leaving information about looted treasure, Antanas has to ask whether his friend's burial of their history had more sinister motives than he suspected. Apart from anything Amber is a war novel, as undead memories of Afghanistan emerge to tell a parallel story to the present. Collishaw has a great grasp of the ordinariness of evil. The atrocities and crimes of his stories are sometimes the work of despicable thugs, sometimes of decent likeable people seized by greed or fear, or merely driven by the brutal logic of being a soldier. It is an invaluable antidote to our perpetual tendency to demonise. Collishaw is effortlessly readable, and considering how many British novels seem to be about the love lives of writers and media types in London, it is wonderful to read someone who has the ambition and imagination (and experience) to broaden readers' horizons, and do so convincingly. The Last Girl, set in Lithuania, gave an intriguing impression of a nation trying to bury its wartime past as it repositions itself in the new Europe. The Lithuania of Amber has similar problems with its role in 'Russia's Vietnam', while the depressing parallels between Russia's invasion of Afghanistan and our own recent wars of liberation remind the reader of what they say about those who fail to learn from history. The story underlines the importance of stories. In both books, it is by finally telling his long-silenced story that the protagonist starts to find some release from the past. (In fact it is this similarity in theme and structure that readers of both novels may find somewhat repetitious.) And yet, in another sense, stories also obfuscate, beguile and insulate us from truth - such as the propaganda that tells Antanas he is a liberator from Islamic terror. In the end, he faces the question of whether the past can ever be truly known, and whether awful truth is always better than ignorance. The telling of traditional stories as Vassily does in Amber is of course a lost art in our society, and the loss is great. I suppose the church is one of the few places where much of a vestige remains. This is valuable. Perhaps the greater issue though is about the stories we tell about our past and our place in the world: does the truth confront us and set us free, or does fiction wrap itself around us and keep us warm? |
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