|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
I usually ignore coverlines on books, but the one by Irish journalist Fergal Keane on the front of THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS made me hopping mad. "This book has all the power of a great thriller, with the humanity and intelligence of the best serious fiction," he says. Argh! Another stupid perpetration of the tired old cliche that genre fiction can't be serious. THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS is a thriller, and an outstanding one at that. And anyone narrow-minded enough to be snobby about the genre will miss out on a poetic, thought-provoking and challenging read. Vlado Petric is a former Sarajevo detective, now reduced to working on building sites in Berlin. In a vivid opening scene, he and a colleague uncover an old Nazi bunker. This is a foretaste of how other old memories, best left buried, will be revealed by the end of the book. When Vlado returns home one night to the small flat he shares with his wife and daughter, he finds an American investigator from the International War Crimes Tribunal waiting for him. Calvin Pine wants him to come to The Hague with him. Vlado accepts when he discovers he'll be helping to track down one of the men responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica. The investigation, though, which moves from Germany to the Netherlands to Bosnia to Italy, uncovers secrets from another generation -- that involved in the second world war. And some of those secrets prove painful for the exiled Vlado. Fesperman, a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is a considerable writer. He paints a vivid, dark picture of the changing face of Europe and of its bygone ghosts -- I found it highly appropriate that as I was reading the book, a host of East European countries were joining the European Union. "Pine and Vlado watched Europe float distantly beneath them out of the window of the jet. Even from the air the land seemed gridded and plotted, the countries backed up against each other like too many children in the same bedroom. Except now they'd all grown old, harbouring their fears and grudges in the same, stale space." That vast, changing map of Europe is a backdrop to the novel. Where refugees fled across borders 60 years ago to escape from war and the Nazis, now citizens of the new Europe move more freely looking for a better life. And Fesperman's elegant prose captures that fluidity and vastness. "He boarded a rattling commuter train for a forty-minute ride to the eastern reaches of the city [Berlin], out to where, if you kept walking, the plains would take you all the way to the forests of Russia." Fesperman proves that the intelligent thriller has had new life breathed into it, and its battlegrounds have shifted from Russia and Northern Ireland to the world's current troublespots. Anyone who has seen Lynda LaPlante's latest superlative TV play Prime Suspect, partially set in Bosnia, will echo this. Welcome to the New Europe.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2004
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
