Book review: Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

Published on Friday 26 February 2010 18:50

Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest by Amos Oz Chatto & Windus, 137pp, £12.99

IN AMOS OZ's 16th work of fiction, described as "a fable for all ages with a dark undertow", an extraordinary tale emerges about a village beneath the slopes of a forested mountain where a whole generation of people have lost – or are simply covering-up – their recent past, when something terrible happened to drive away all the animals and birds: "No wanderer ever stayed longer than two nights because the village was cursed: it was always eerily silent … and the villagers barely spoke to each other beyond the essential things."

This deep conspiracy becomes so visceral that the children grow up in ignorance. At night, along with their parents, they fear the descent of the Mountain Demon from his castle beyond the perpetually cloud-shrouded peaks. By day there is guilt and veiled suspicion, a palpable misery made more stark by the one gleam of happiness in the village – the presence of Nimi, a boy so joyous that other children constantly bully him, driving him finally into the forest and seeming oblivion.

The mob is triumphant; but two small refusniks bide their time. Maya and Matti possess curiosity. Matti's father refuses to tell him why the animals and birds deserted the village long ago.

"This conversation never happened," he says. Other parents go even further by denying that the animals spurned the village's human inhabitants in the first place. A case of history being rewritten.

Meanwhile Maya feels irresistibly drawn to explore the surrounding trees, the place of Nimi's disappearance. Matti, nervously follows her lead. What, and who, they find in the course of their expedition forms the fable's heart and substance.

But even before this, Oz lets the reader in on what happened during that wet, stormy winter night, when the animals vanished.

"A few old people," he tells us, "are ready to swear that they saw the shadow of Nehi the Mountain Demon passing through at the head of a long procession of shadows…" If this desertion is a punishment, what was the crime? If this is the tale, then what is its moral?

Oz is not, and has never been, in the futile business of telling readers what to think. Much has been read into what he writes, given his active part in political debate concerning possible future settlements between Palestine and Israel. Nevertheless, it would not be difficult to find elements here of Holocaust denial, of revisionism, of the fear of fear itself, of collective trauma and conspiracy, of persecution of those who swim outside the mainstream. And Matti and Maya do reach their goal, confront the Demon, (is he real or metaphysical?), learning much about the history of the village, and human foibles in the process, while giving the Demon as good as they get – and finding Nimi into the bargain.

Oz's long-time translator, Nicholas de Lange – who over 37 years detected the inner-gleam of the Hebrew phrasing, imperceptibly catching its cadence, tone and rhythm in English – is the one voice missing from this modern fable. A new translator is on the case, and sadly it shows. There are stretches where the signature tensile muscularity of Oz's authorial voice just fails to materialise. But the "dark undertow" of the subtitle is nevertheless palpable.

Do the explorers return? Must they pay a price for unearthing the truth and receiving its lessons? Will they be overwhelmed by the darkness? Oz keeps us hanging, not searching for meaning or morals or metaphysical grist, just pursuing the narrative to its end, which in fact turns out to be a beginning.