A Sunday at the pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche
Siegfried by Harry Mulisch
In his latest novel, Elizabeth Costello, JM Coetzee turns the English-born writer Paul West into a fictional character. West, who lives and works in America, exists; he is the author of The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, a little-known novel about the lives and gruesome deaths of the aristocratic German officers who failed in their attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. In his novel, West imagines what happened to the men following their capture. He details the humiliation and pain of their torture and of the last hours before their execution. The pages of his novel are soaked in the blood of these unlucky men. Can anyone, asks Coetzee's fictional alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, wander as deep as West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed?
Later, Costello, who is a well-known writer but one exhausted by her fame and by the tawdry demands of the writing life, meets West at a conference in Amsterdam, where she is to give a paper on him and his novel, The Very Rich Hours, which she thinks is "obscene." She observes him with scorn and no little mockery.
Reading Elizabeth Costello, one wonders how Paul West must feel about having his life appropriated in this way? How does it feel to become a character in a novel, your autonomy stolen so that you become a puppet of authorial will? What is Coetzee up to? Is he punishing West for daring to represent the lives of real people in fiction, turning their private suffering into a pornography of misery? Or is the austere Nobel laureate warning us that there are events in life, such as the violent death of the German plotters, which must never be violated or turned into fiction?
These are the kinds of questions that must have occurred to both Gil Courtemanche and Harry Mulisch during the writing of, respectively, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and Siegfried. For both novels feature real people and actual historical events, but they are, at the same time, unapologetic works of fiction and thus works of selection and imagination and embellishment. They are the latest examples of that fashionable genre, history-as-fiction. Of the two novels, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, which is set in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, is immeasurably superior: it has the authenticity and urgency of great reportage and is propelled not only by rage and sorrow, but by a sense of love, for those who were killed and for the fallen African country itself. Siegfried, by comparison, in which Hitler and Eva Braun are actual characters, is an elaborate fake. This kind of novel is seldom, if ever, written in Britain or America. It is characteristically a work of the high-bourgeois continental European sensibility. It is the work of a (Dutch) writer who is enthralled by the great western canon, who moves through life in a nebulous swirl of allusion and half remembered quotation, a writer in search of a big theme, something appropriate to the horror of our times. And what bigger theme is there than the Nazi catastrophe?
Hitler remains, after all, "incomprehensible," as Mulisch's aged novelist-hero, Rudolf Herter, helpfully reminds us. "All those explanations have simply made Hitler invisible," he says. "If you ask me, he's sitting in hell laughing himself silly. It's time that was changed. Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in."
But Hitler has already been fictionalised in too many novels and films, and always manages to slip through one hole or another. In his quest for the truth about Hitler, Mulisch's protagonist reminds me of the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long book called Explaining Hitler in which he travelled the world, on the back of a decent publisher's advance, interviewing scholars about the mysterious personality of Adolf Hitler. He travelled far and wide, only to conclude that Hitler could not be explained. He was unknowable, a vacuum.
This is the conclusion that Herter reaches too. While on a trip to Vienna he encounters an elderly couple who had worked for Hitler and looked after the child he fathered with Eva Braun (yes, really!) and from whom he receives the diary Braun kept during her last days in Hitler's bunker. Out of all this, Hitler emerges as what the historian Joachim Fest long ago called an "unperson."
Rather than producing a satire of the Hitler industry, which is a good subject for a novel, or a docudrama, Mulisch's novel ends up merely contributing to our fetishism of the F?hrer.
One therefore turns with relief from Mulisch's pseudo-novel to the real thing. Gil Courtemanche is a French-Canadian journalist who made a celebrated film about Aids in Rwanda. During his time in the country he befriended many people, both Hutu and Tutsi, most of whom were killed in the genocide that began in April 1994 following the death of President Habyarimana, a Hutu, in a plane crash. In this novel these lost friends return from the dead, only to be murdered all over again in devastating scenes of violence and suffering.
Although there are many shifts in point of view, the main character is a French-Canadian journalist called Bernard Valcourt, whose experiences closely resemble those of Courtemanche himself. Valcourt is an exhausted libertine. His wife is dead, his prospects are bleak. His home in Kigali is the Mille-Collines hotel. There, lying around the hotel swimming pool, his fellow guests are corrupt Belgian businessmen, western aid workers, diplomats, French paratroopers, Paris-returned Rwandan plutocrats and Aids-stricken prostitutes. Everyone at the hotel is, it seems, on the look out for rough or dirty sex. Meanwhile, Rwanda seethes and burns.
Working at the Mille-Collines is a young waitress called Gentille. She is a Hutu but, because she is tall, slim and beautiful, her father has encouraged her to pass as a Tutsi, as a member of the ruling caste. Her beauty charms, torments, infatuates and delights Valcourt. She awakens him from his death-seeking slumber. They begin an affair, rendered with rare honesty and fervour. Their happiness is fragile; out there in the countryside Tutsis are already being slaughtered. Soon people are being killed in Kigali and, one by one, Valcourt's friends are swept away in the frenzy. In one unforgettable scene, a Tutsi called Cyprien, who is HIV positive, is on his way home, having spent the evening with Valcourt and Gentille, when he discovers his wife being raped by Hutu militia at a checkpoint. They order Cyprien to have sex with the woman, who is bleeding and in pain. He is not scared because, as he tells his wife, it is "better to die of pleasure than of torture." And so, mocked by his torturers, Cyprien begins to make love to his wife, "with a delicacy he did not recognise in himself." As he caresses her body, Cyprien is slashed with machetes, so that blood runs "like a hot river between his buttocks and wetting his testicles." He is killed on the point of orgasm, spraying his attackers with semen.
Reading this astonishing scene one thinks of Baudelaire, for whom the link between sex and death was inextricable. But there is in this novel none of the sexual disgust one encounters in Baudelaire. Instead, against the massacres and the cruelty of the Interahamwe, is set the modesty of love - the love Cyprien expresses for his stricken wife, and that Valcourt feels for Gentille, from whom he is eventually, and desperately, separated as they attempt to flee the country.
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has been criticised for its political inaccuracies, bad history and harsh portraits of Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN assistance mission in Rwanda, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which now holds power in Rwanda. This would matter if Courtemanche had written a work of reportage or non-fiction. His work should then be assessed by the same criteria with which one assesses any work of fact: truth and its accuracy of source material. But fictional truth is different; it has less to do with whether something is true to life than whether it is true to the life created within the fiction, as both JM Coetzee and Paul West know. In this sense, Gil Courtemanche speaks the truth, humanly, about love and sex in the face of death and, in broad sweep rather than in particular detail, about what happened in Rwanda. Harry Mulisch, on the other hand, is telling only lies - not only about the child that Hitler never had, but about so much else that matters in the world of make-believe.
