A difficult but necessary tale of war, death
“Beirut Hellfire Society” by Rawi Hage, 288 pages, $29.95 hardcover
This novel about an undertaker during Beirut’s civil war marks a return to the setting of Rawi Hage’s first novel, “De Niro’s Game,” which won the Dublin IMPAC Award and was a finalist for the Giller, Governor General’s and several other awards. Hage’s childhood included nine years in Beirut during the conflict in the 1970s and ’80s. He moved to Canada in 1992 and lives in Montreal with his partner, the author Madeleine Thien. Now in his 50s, he has been to an increasing number of funerals and lists several deceased relatives in the acknowledgments.
What would life be like for an undertaker in the midst of daily bombings and shootings? Pavlov, the narrator, is the son of an undertaker who lives in an apartment overlooking one of Beirut’s cemeteries. From his balcony he watches the daily funeral marches, some with music and dancing (when elders have died), some with loud wailing (deaths of children and middle-aged relatives). His father catered to the two sides in the civil war, both Christian and Muslim. But he was also part of a secret society that “worshipped” fire and regarded cremation and ashes as the finest way to dispose of mortal remains. The Hellfire Society arranges for the secret burial and later cremation for those who die on the battlefield without family, church or mosque to deal with them. Homosexuals and atheists were similarly shunned. When Pavlov’s father dies, the Society approaches him to continue their rituals.
Pavlov is hired to pre-arrange the secret cremation of outsiders on the fringe of Beirut’s society. One is El-Marquis, a libertine professor named after the Marquis de Sade, who seduces female students and plans his own funeral as a lavish orgy with his body in a wedding dress hanging from a chandelier. Another client is a pair of brothers whose Spanish mother was shot by their father. The local Christian and Muslim authorities refuse to bury her as a communist and atheist. They need Pavlov to arrange for her body to be returned to Spain. The plan is to hide their father in her casket and then confront him on the ship returning to Spain. After the father ‘suicides,’ the one brother stays on in Beirut hoping to photograph a falling bomb.
I read this book, which is full of death, following two back-toback funerals. Like Pavlov, I was struck by the different ways we ritualize death in our culture. One funeral was entirely secular, a sharing of stories and memories by family and friends in a funeral home’s parlour. The other was a full Lutheran service in a funeral chapel followed by a luncheon. Pavlov is both observer and participant in the myriad rituals surrounding death, burial and secret cremations. During one funeral procession, a bomb strike kills the priest and several mourners including a young boy. He rushes out to help the survivors and lay out the newly deceased. Who can imagine such trauma and destruction?
Saving his own life becomes his focus as he crosses no man’s land to retrieve the body of a childhood friend or to deal with gang leaders. His deathmobile (hearse) is an unwelcome sight but is also his passport amid the fighting. He relates better to dogs than to humans. Sexuality is an antidote to endless dying but many readers will find the details disturbing, particularly that orgy scene. The war in Lebanon lasted from 1975 to 1990 with 120,000 fatalities and over a million people leaving the country. The current war in Syria goes on with even greater losses and émigrés. We in Canada have little way of imagining life trying for any semblance of normalcy under such conditions. “Beirut Hellfire Society” is a difficult but necessary read. Its carefully wrought, often poetic, writing is what kept me reading.