Weekend Australian
May 18, 2013 Saturday
5 – All-round Review Edition
Harrowing stories from a broken world
Review by Peter Pierce
Bone Ash Sky
By Katerina Cosgrove
Hardie Grant, 465pp, $29.95
KATERINA Cosgrove’s first novel, The Glass Heart, was published as
long ago as 2000. It has been worth the wait for the second (although
the author may have a different opinion). The austerely titled Bone
Ash Sky is an often grisly panorama of
20th-century history that begins with the displacement of Armenians
from their home country by the Turks during World War I.
The Pakradounian family, on whom Cosgrove concentrates, is uprooted
from “that mythical place called Van” whose lake — “with its
colours of bone and ash and sky” — is the focus of nostalgia across
the generations.
Some of those who survive what became known (still contentiously in
Turkey) as the Armenian genocide or the first holocaust, in which a
million people might have perished, find their difficult and
circuitous way to Beirut. It is to that city, where she was born 29
years before, that Anoush Pakradounian travels from Boston, in time
for the war crimes tribunal in which her father, Selim, has been
posthumously indicted.
Spanning 80 years, weaving convoluted family history into a succession
of historical calamities, the story is nonetheless always under
Cosgrove’s tight narrative control. We move backwards and forwards
between the death marches of 1915 from Armenia into Syria, the
Lebanese civil war and Israeli occupation of 1982, and the novel’s
present time of 1995, in which a peace prevails, however temporary
that may prove.
Cosgrove’s account of the genocide is one of the most harrowing
extended passages in recent Australian writing: “the gendarmes lay
the tiny corpses out on the sand”; “This is where three thousand of
us were burnt alive only months ago”; “In the coming days the
remaining Armenian prisoners were shod like horses with the nails
driven into their soles”.
For those who escape — such as the brother and sister Minas and Lilit
Pakradounian — there is one grim, resonant obligation: “Observe.
Remember. Record.”
Such horrors recurred, on a smaller scale, in the Lebanese civil war.
Selim was second in charge of a Phalangist or Christian militia that
specialised in the “assassinations of key Muslims” and (his
particular crime) in murdering Palestinian refugees: “They had been
instructed to kill every living thing in the Sabra-Shatila camp.”
Anoush’s quest is to find out how her father, who abandoned her at
birth, at the same time as her mother died, was himself killed in
1983. This is not the much trodden fictional path of seeking solace in
the uncovering of one’s roots. Rather, Anoush’s venture will confuse,
dismay and engulf her. Cosgrove’s heroine is passionate, overwrought
and as unforgiving of her failings as of those she proclaims in
others.
She lets herself be led into deeper and more unexpected complications:
with families in Beirut with whom her father was mortally connected,
and with a patriotic Israeli who yet dedicates himself to removing
landmines in Palestine.
Several sections of the novel open with literal as well as
metaphorical detonations: deaths by sniper fire and car bombing or —
in the case of Anoush’s grandfather, Minas — “by his own rage”.
Anoush is confronted by contested versions of bitter events as she
confides, not without histrionics, that “I come closer to the core of
my history, the blackness”.
What to make of a father who evidently believed his killings were
justifiable because he was the son of a genocide survivor? Or of the
tales with which she grew up in childhood: “My grandmother became the
slave of a Turk. My grandfather was incarcerated in a death camp.”
These intractable elements of her past — and Anoush’s own integrity
— mean she neither seeks nor expects absolution for herself for what
has happened before. Rather — in one of Cosgrove’s most daring
touches — she takes on future burdens that most likely will prove
disastrous: taking custody of the daughter of the jihadist bomber of
the American embassy in Beirut who had ordered her father’s death to
coincide with his own.
Anoush allows herself few consolations. Her birthplace is described
acerbically. Beirut has “the beauty of an Orient past so idealised
and yet so corrupted in these halfway countries, neither East nor
West, delicately amoral, carelessly precise, in an advanced state of
decay”.
Bone Ash Sky is a novel of an ambition that is no longer uncommon in
Australian fiction, but it is still remarkable. The interlacing of
disparate characters’ lives might have been implausible. In Cosgrove’s
hands it seems fated. This is a novel that for long stretches is
gruelling to read, not only in its recounting of atrocities, but in
the matter-of-factness with which the child, Inam, tells Anoush that
she knows how her father killed Anoush’s father and then himself:
“They’re both in Hell.”
For Cosgrove, a Sydney writer with Greek roots who spent a long and
fruitful time researching this novel, Bone Ash Sky may seem like the
recommencement of her career. It is, in any event, a notable feat of
imagination and execution on a scale that never daunted her.
______________________________
>> Peter Pierce edited the Cambridge History of Australian Literature.
Katerina Cosgrove will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, May 20-26.