I think it’s ... a book that’s championing humanity. I also think it’s time for the conversation that’s already happening and that I hope this book will help along.
Author Rawi Hage on his novel Beirut Hellfire Society
Beirut Hellfire Society Rawi Hage
Knopf Canada The sound bite around Rawi Hage’s fourth novel, at least in its early days, will likely be something to the effect that the writer is “back in Beirut.” But don’t make too much of that.
De Niro’s Game, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning debut that introduced the Lebanon-born Montrealer to the world in 2006, was followed by Cockroach and Carnival, each dealing in various ways with the immigrant experience. Beirut Hellfire Society finds him once again employing his old home, and at roughly the same historical juncture: the calamitous Lebanese civil war of the late 1970s. Dig into it beyond a page or two, though, and you’ll know it’s not a sequel.
“(De Niro’s Game) was very much a first book, with references to personal experience,” said the soft-spoken author, recalling that tale of young men negotiating their way around the war-ravaged city that he himself left in 1984, when he was 20. “This book has little in common with it beyond the location.”
Underlining his point, Hage revealed something intriguing about the new novel’s genesis.
“I originally thought about setting the book in Sarajevo,” he said. “It may sound cold to say this, but I needed an abundance of death to write this book. In the end, I chose Beirut because it’s familiar terrain for me. But this is not a book about the war. That’s in the background and it’s there for a very specific purpose. It provides me with cadavers.”
Pavlov, the novel’s central figure, is an undertaker, named by his undertaker father in honour of the Russian scientist whose research with dogs chimes well with the nightmarish world Hage creates: In a place gone seemingly mad, canines can look like the noblest creatures left.
Handily, Pavlov lives next to a cemetery, and has witnessed so many funeral processions that he can accurately guess the age of the deceased before the grieving party comes into view. This is a place where even the funeral processions get attacked.
As for the titular society, it is a loosely knit group of people whose outcast status in life is mirrored by their need for an unconventional handling in death. Honourbound to serve them, though also paid handsomely, Pavlov is in no position to play favourites, aiding people who have exhibited some very dubious behaviour and even indulging in some himself when the occasion calls for it. If you demand that a work of fiction provide stable demarcation lines between good and evil, you’re best advised to move on. Hage is pursuing something altogether different.
“Sympathy is irrelevant in literature,” he said flatly. “So is morality, for that matter. People who want that should read a particular kind (of book). It seems more and more exterior factors demand a kind of pedagogical, moralistic contribution to literature, but for me it’s about freedom. It should be considered a safe space where everything can and should be expressed.”
Hage uses that freedom to make a wild, viscerally exciting and often bleakly funny novel of ideas. Comparisons aren’t always useful, but this reviewer thought of a work portraying a very different time and place but equally unflinching in its de-romanticizing of a subject most of us prefer to avoid: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
There are also touches of the Latin American magic realism Hage loves: In an early passage, a bomb takes on a mind of its own, alighting over the blasted cityscape in whimsical search of a target before settling on a figure resembling no one so much as Jesus Christ.
“That’s right,” said Hage. “And that’s heresy, it’s blasphemy, something that is currently being made illegal even in some supposedly secular places.”
Pavlov and his father, with their meticulous observances around the sending of human bodies “into the abode of fire, light and eternal warmth,” can appear oddly religious for men who claim no particular faith.
“Well, I created a kind of austere, mishmash religion for them,” said Hage. “One with some rituals borrowed from various sources in the region. I wanted to show how easy it is to construct a religion.”
Speaking of which, where does the Catholic-raised Hage place himself in the believer-to-atheist spectrum?
“I’m a free thinker, so the question is irrelevant to me. Maybe one way to put it is that I’m not a believer until God proves himself.”
It seems safe to say that Beirut Hellfire Society, a novel that practically defines iconoclasm, will elicit some spirited opposition as it makes its way out into the world.
“Sure,” he said. “But I don’t care. I think it’s a humane book, a book that’s championing humanity. I also think it’s time for the conversation that’s already happening and that I hope this book will help along.”
Given his omnivorous reading and general cultural engagement, the opportunity to ask Hage about his current reading and listening is hard to resist.
“I recently read Le Royaume, or The Kingdom, by Emmanuel Carrère. He’s asking what it is to have faith from a French intellectual’s perspective.
“It’s a novel that reads like a memoir. I enjoyed it.
“Music? Well, the other day I was listening to Thelonious Monk. What I like about jazz is its humility, the idea that as a listener I can move from one instrument to another, give a certain instrument predominance and then let it retreat into the background.”
So, does he work with a musical backdrop?
“Oh, no,” he said, as though the very notion were absurd. “When I’m writing, I need total silence. Sometimes I’ll turn off the fridge.”