A difficult read that is necessary
This will have been a difficult novel to write. Not only because of its subject matter, the trials that were the first to convict a rapist in wartime not of rape but of a war crime. It will have been difficult, because that material is so difficult to write around. Like a black hole in a Sci-Fi movie, everything else just spirals around and gets sucked into it, which in a novel can make for difficult storytelling.
This will also be a difficult novel to read, for those reasons, as well as one other. The rape of thousands of Bosnian women during the war of 1992 to 1995 is a fact. The trial in The Hague five years later is also a fact. They are big, weighty facts, facts with their own gravity. And reading them turned into fiction, with different names and back stories, no matter how emotionally honest, no matter how respectfully rendered, can seem irreverent. Is it the author’s story to tell? Is it anyone’s? Or should the facts, as stark as any facts have ever been, stand on their own, without having somebody else’s response tacked on?
But maybe I’m wrong.
People read stories, but they also feel them, and understand them in ways that lead to more direct understanding than facts usually do
I also used to think Margaret Atwood should stick to nonfiction. She has so many facts, figures, contexts, timelines, analyses, understandings, insights at her fingertips that writing directly about abortion, or sexual assault, or environmental degradation, or the death of birds would be so much more useful, and less subject to misunderstanding, could lead more directly to, for example, legislation, than a story about a red-hooded dystopia or woman who eats herself as a cake.
I was wrong about that. People read stories, but they also feel them, and understand them in ways that lead to more direct understanding than facts usually do.
“Speak, Silence” by Giller-shortlisted Toronto author Kim Echlin is an unbalanced book, wobbly and sometimes sluggish, not so much pear-shaped as like a python after it’s eaten a goat. The scenes of our protagonist’s Toronto life in her Annex home never quite weave themselves in to that other narrative, in Sarajevo and The Hague, nor achieve sufficient density to be its counterweight. And it can seem at times that the author’s been overwhelmed by her own material, pushing her language in poetic and aphoristic directions that mostly don’t work with the rawness of the story she has to tell.
But — and this is one of the biggest “buts” I’ve ever written into a book review — you need to read this book. To use an image that she and Yugoslavian novelist Ivo Andric also use, “Speak, Silence” is a bridge between those purely fictional stories of women’s trauma at the hands of men, and the purely nonfiction books about the war crime of rape.
Before reading this book, readers may or may not understand the role rape has always played in war, and the specific use to which it’s put in genocidal wars. But after reading this book, they will feel it. And once they feel it, they may come closer to understanding, if they didn’t already, that though someone killed in a war leaves a crater, ending stories and stopping others from ever being written, rape is poison that continues to spread long after.
You’ll probably get pissed off at this book, especially the ending. And it’s a book about rape and trauma and the possibility that justice is either impossible or impotent even when it’s achieved, so you won’t be happier for having read it, but — and I think I’m right about this — you’ll be better for it.
Like Echlin’s heroine, Bert Archer also used to write about travel, live just off Sibelius Park, and once had an intense but brief sex thing with someone in Sarajevo.