Turow’s ‘Testimony’ proves a confusing but amusing tale
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Reviewing “Testimony” by Scott Turow presented a real problem for me. I read through it quickly, mostly because some of it is set in a part of BosniaHerzegovina (BiH) that I know fairly well, and the subject matter of the narrative is familiar to me. At the same time, in spite of the fact that Mr. Turow is a well-known writer with many best-sellers to his credit, I found “Testimony” to be flawed as a novel.
What was fun in the book for me was revisiting the towns and people of Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Testimony” also provides glimpses of the international courts and the American bureaucracy including the departments of Defense and State.
The cast of characters involved in contracting goods and services in places such as BiH, Somalia and Lebanon were familiar and summoned up memories. What was worrisome as I looked at “Testimony” from the point of view of a reader who would not know a Chetnik from a pierogi, was that the plot might be difficult to follow.
Mr. Turow captures to some degree the bizarre atmosphere of BiH after the 1992-95 war, estimated to have killed 100,000 and left the country in a ghastly mess in spite of the socalled Dayton Accords arrived at among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims under American arm-twisting at Dayton, Ohio.
There were refugee — or, internally displaced — camps, soldiers of many nations, including American, other NATO and Russian forces, and the remnants of different BiH forces, Serb, Croat and Muslim militias, and armed criminal gangs.
In this context in “Testimony,” from a camp near Tuzla in northeast Bosnia, the town where Hillary Clinton claimed falsely to have been shot at, some 400 Roma, also called Gypsies, disappeared. To my knowledge, this didn’t act u a l l y h a p p e n , b u t it serves well as the basis for the novel.
Mr. Turow’s protagon i s t , the experienced American lawyer William ten Boom, known as “Boom,” acting on behalf of the International Criminal Court based in The Layton Merriwell, is supposed Hague, is dispatched to to be Gen. David Petraeus, find out what happened to who served in BiH. them and why. A witness His role in the alleged affair, suggests that the 400 Roma Boom’s deconstruction were put into a cave by of it and what was in someone and buried alive. it for the general remain a
A subplot, the roman a little obscure even at the clef part, centers on the last page. longstanding unsuccessful The story runs, confusingly, effort by NATO and the from The Hague, to Americans to catch the Tuzla and Sarajevo in BiH, president of the former Republika to Washington, to Vienna, Srpska, the Serbian to Boom’s hometown and part of the the fractured to New York. I underlined BiH. In “Testimony” where the characters were the fugitive is known as while reading along, trying Laza Kajevic. In real life — to make sense of what Radovan Karadzic. was happening.
The now imprisoned The character of Boom Karadzic was an egotistical is fairly believable, although homicidal monster, responsible I found his various inter alia for the love interests, including Srebrenica massacre by his ex-wife who had a double the Serbs of 8,000 Muslim identity as a Roma and men and boys. One effort sometime Iranian, and his to capture him while I was Indonesian landlady, excessive there involved a relative’s and sometimes extraneous funeral in Trebinje in to the plot. Some southern BiH, part of my of the other characters, including territory. an important one
Another subplot in the of uncertain sexuality and book involves a discredited another who expressed former American general himself in Australian who had been commander slang, were not as sympathetic of the U.S. troops as they were intended in the area where the to be. Roma disappeared. If the reader can keep Another of the knots Boom track of the plot without is supposed to unravel is finding the Bosnia-Herzegovina whether the Americans context impenetrable, had been involved in their “Testimony” is an fate, and, if so, why. I think amusing read. I enjoyed the general, in the book, being back in the hills of that mystifying Balkan nation, although Mr. Turow leaves out one unpleasant feature: You could not walk around freely because so much of the natural terrain was mined, including some picturesque churches. I don’t think Mr.Turow named his protagonist Boom as irony, although it would have fit.