Minor Detail
Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) Text; $24.99
A coiled hose, a howling dog, terebinth trees, soap suds, the smell of petrol on human skin. These details are so subtly embedded in part one of Minor Detail that when they recur in part two they gain a holographic glow. Palestinian Adania Shibli’s cinematic novel stages a return of the repressed on a national scale by reprising an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in the Negev region in 1949. In 2003, Israeli newspaper Haaretz used newly unclassified army documents to uncover the crime: “In August 1949 an IDF unit caught a Bedouin girl, held her captive in a Negev outpost, gang-raped her, executed her at the order of the platoon commander and buried her in a shallow grave in the desert.” After a secret trial the commander was jailed and 19 soldiers received light sentences. “On the first night the soldiers abused her,” reported the commander, “and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world.”
Shibli reimagines this event from two viewpoints. Part one unfolds over four days in August, 1949. From a cool distance we follow the commander as he orders his soldiers to detain the girl, then collectively vote on her fate. In his hut, feverish from an insect bite and compulsively washing, he unravels. Shibli’s third novel is an unflinching account of violence and dehumanisation, and J.M. Coetzee’s endorsement might alert us to the tradition in which this exceptional writer is working – except that Shibli breaks new ground.
Her masterstroke is to abruptly change tone, setting part two in the present, where a young woman from Ramallah undertakes her own investigation into the crime. This perspective shift reminds us of the continuing violence in Palestine, where our unnamed narrator lives and works with the ceaseless noise of warplanes, shelling, ambulances and military sirens. Obsessed with a “minor detail” in the account of the atrocity that “will stay with me forever; in spite of myself and how hard I try to forget it”, she borrows an identity card, hires a car and packs competing maps of the territory’s changing borders and settlements. After passing through several checkpoints, each time growing more terrified that her identity will be discovered, our narrator reaches the site of the murder. Why does it haunt her? A less skilful writer might have reproduced the lurid details from the press, but those reports relied solely on what the soldiers disclosed. Shibli instead uses a lyrical, intensely sensory mode to describe how we identify with figures from the past, and especially the restless dead. She reprises the howling dog, the trees, the hose, the petrol stench. Now more potent, now spectral, these motifs link past and present.
Shibli’s protagonist is in the mould of literature’s obsessives. Coetzee calls her “profoundly self-absorbed” and “high on the autism scale”. But this doesn’t address the way external conditions – life under occupation, being repeatedly held at gunpoint – are the likely cause of her agitation. She’s foolhardy, apologetic, a stutterer, unable to “evaluate situations rationally”. At every checkpoint, she experiences “the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier”. Ultimately, she resists self-absorption by seeking justice – however minor, however private – through her rash act of witnessing. Minor Detail refuses the commander’s “I saw fit to remove her from the world”, by restoring an unnamed Bedouin girl to history. It is brutal, hypnotic and haunting.
M
Is Robbie Arnott the Tasmanian Wordsworth? For some artists, landscape is both inspiration and filter, and the Tasmanian wilderness is to Arnott what the Lakes District was to Wordsworth. The Rain Heron has an intriguing human cast: a woman who lives in a mountain cave, a man and a boy foraging on the edge of a village, a small band of soldiers led by an impassive woman who moves with the grace of a dancer. But the landscape dominates: hills, trees, mosses, gullies, places reminiscent of the Jurassic period, perhaps, some time before the reach of humans. The setting, though, is now well within human reach. At its heart, in this near future, is a myth about a bird, a heron that has extraordinary powers. It can change the weather, bring rain or drought. It can be sweet or savage. The soldiers want the bird and they know that the woman in the cave knows where it lives.
Arnott’s first novel, Flames, won the 2019 Margaret Scott Prize in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. Flames revealed Arnott’s discipline in maintaining a line between the magical and the humdrum, which stopped him being annoying. And he does this again. The natural world is real and marvellous in the sense that it is full of things at which to marvel, and the most shocking, most violent acts are not those of humans against humans but humans against the natural world. Arnott writes about a type of human animal who believes they ordered up nature bespoke. The soldiers are hunting the bird as a trophy, not for any power it has.
Part One is preceded by some brief pages called Part 0, a modern parable positioning the novel. It describes a farmer whose fortunes change from ill luck to bounty when the fabled bird visits her. In her years of luck, the woman is magnanimous with her fortune but the actions of a deprived and ignorant child undo it all. Part One, describing the soldiers hunting the bird, has a nice tension between terror and hope. The graceful leader has a ponytail that catches the morning light, and the reader’s impulse is to assume kindness and goodness until a few sharp brutalities tell otherwise. That the menace is beautiful will put any reader off-kilter. We’ve just stepped into another world.
Arnott’s world wobbles between now and the future. It’s a comfortless place. People are defensive, withdrawn into small bands, and trust is an archaic notion. The children have never known innocence because their first lessons had to be in survival. All emotion, insight, the refinements of civilised human behaviour, have been honed for reflexive defence. Because of this, the characters are assembled as if they belong on the pages of a graphic novel rather than explored with imaginative warmth. In the vigilant future, perhaps imaginative warmth will be just another outdated virtue. The Rain Heron is an unsettling adult jigsaw.
M
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