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May 12, 2002
REVIEW: Doing the unspeakable
THIS poetic and moving new novel is remarkably prescient dealing as it does with two of the hottest topics of the moment - terrorism and gormandising on gorgeous food. The protagonist who is equally at home with both activities remains unnamed as he dispatches innumerable meals and dishes out half-baked political ideas. The witty amalgam of his terrorist training activities and his eating feats remain strangely and surrealistically embedded in the reader’s memory, so startling and episodic is the prose.
It is almost impossible to believe in anybody’s consciousness but our own and the talent of a good novelist is to transport us into the consciousness of others. This Berberian does quite expertly with his terrorist-in-training. So much so that we feel every strain of his young body as he gets himself fit by riding a bike up and down the Lebanese mountains and endlessly around Hampstead Heath. We lie with him on his hospital bed, his body wracked with injuries and stuffed with quantities of medical aids. We live with him as he eats his way through every known Middle Eastern delicacy.
There are vivid glimpses of the elite team of four terrorists, the so-called Attorneys of the Shower Party who are to plant a bomb (called the ‘baby’) in a large hotel in Beirut. The whole set-up is highly surrealistic, very imaginative and set about with jokey symbols. Which is quite unlike the pen sketches of the September 11 terrorists pieced together by The Wall Street Journal. The descriptions here were of incredibly banal lives led in the US and Europe. Even back in their childhood homes in the Middle East they seemed to have a degree of comfort and conformity that Berberian’s man would barely have recognized. Journalists, of course, can observe the detail and logistics of a lifestyle but find it difficult to enter a person’s consciousness.
In The cyclist, by contrast, you are there right inside this fellow’s head. So much so that towards the end, as the fatal bike ride begins, the ‘baby’ strapped on his back I thought, “No, he can’t do it.’ The author takes us right to the wire, so to speak, but he can’t let the likable scamp do the unspeakable. His fellow terrorists conveniently call it off and his pregnant girlfriend decides she wants him alive, not dead. So the author lets the chap off the moral hook.
This is a fatal weakness of the novel, which is why I’m naughtily revealing the end. But I think it’s as well to know at the beginning of the book that this is not an insight into the terrorist mind; so that you can thoroughly enjoy the quirky imagery, the supple rhythmic prose and possibility of perceiving another’s consciousness whose love of food survives but not his terrorist intent.
The cyclist
By Viken Berberian
Simon and Schuster
ISBN 0-7432-2283-0
189pp. $22.00
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