Book review: An Unfinished Business

Published on Friday 15 January 2010 18:30

AN Unfinished Business by Boualem Sansal Bloomsbury, 239pp, £16.99

BOUALEM Sansal is an Algerian novelist who writes in French. His books have been censored and roughly treated in his own country, but this novel, his first to be translated into English, won prizes in France and Belgium. It is very fine and painful.

The story is told by two brothers, Rachel ("Rachid Helmut but people shortened it to Rachel and it stuck"), the elder by 14 years, and Malrich. Their father was German, their mother Berber, and both were sent to France as young boys to be educated there. Rachel was a good student. He found employment with a multinational company and was a success; he married a French girl and escaped from the grim housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. Malrich, rebellious and unfocused, bummed around. For a short time he was recruited by an Islamist preacher, but turned against that. Often in trouble – though not serious – with the police and the courts, he and his mates, mostly of mixed race, have lived, sometimes happily, sometimes angrily, for the moment.

Then their parents, living in a village in Algeria, caught up in the conflict between a brutal government and fanatical Islamists, were murdered when the Islamists attacked their village and slaughtered as many of its inhabitants as they could. Rachel made the dangerous journey to the village to see his parents' graves. In their house he came on a case containing his father's papers, and was horrified by what he found. His stern but benign Papa, a man revered in he village and a hero of the War of Liberation against France – a war in which he had trained the insurgents – had previously been an officer in the SS. Worse still, as a chemical engineer, he had served in Dachau and Auschwitz. In short, as Malrich later realises, "Papa was a war criminal".

Rachel can't escape the horror of that discovery, or its consequences. His life is overturned. The successful young businessman becomes obsessed by what he has learned of his father's guilt – a guilt that we have no reason to believe the man himself ever felt. He begins to keep a diary in which he explores its significance. (Part of the book is made up of this diary, part of it Malrich's revised version, he tells us, and put into better French by the woman whose prize pupil Rachel had been.)

Rachel follows the course of his father's life, determined to experience in his mind the full horror of Papa's complicity in the Holocaust. He recounts this in terrible detail. His journey takes him two years. Then he kills himself. It is the closest he can come to an act of atonement. We actually learn of his suicide in the novel's first paragraph at a time when Malrich "had no idea what had happened to him … couldn't imagine how far he had come, how far I had still to go".

Malrich's own response is different. Utterly ignorant of the events of the 1939-45 war until he reads his brother's diaries and the books he has collected – he and his friends don't even know about the Holocaust, something that is sadly all too probable – he refuses to assume the burden of his father's guilt. Instead, made painfully aware of the nature of fascist ideology by his experience of what the Islamists are doing to the people of his estate, and by what he learns of their relegation of unbelievers to the ranks of the sub-human, he concludes that the Holocaust was an extreme example – even if the most extreme – of the fanaticism, cruelty and sheer wickedness that may appear, and come to dominate, in any time and place.

Some may think it a weakness that we never get any real sense of their father, the war criminal, no understanding of how this organiser of death became the seemingly benign and certainly respected father figure of the remote Algerian village. But surely this is as it should be. Sansal presents us with the inexplicable, and has the courage and literary good sense to refrain from hazarding any explanation.

This is a remarkable novel, and, given the author's nationality, his continued residence in Algeria, and the response he dares to invite from the militant Islamists, a remarkably brave one. It is compelling and gripping. The horrors of man's inhumanity to man are presented unblinkingly; we cannot avoid them, and no attempt is made to excuse or palliate them. But Malrich, though he ends by feeling all alone, brought to the realisation that "life is unbearably sad". The mixed-up kid emerges from his ordeal a stoic, and undefeated.