*****
Carlos Gamerro's The Islands (translated by Ian Barnett) was written in 1998, but set in 1992, ten years after the war. It follows Felipe Félix, a veteran of the conflict, as he moves around Buenos Aires in search of information. Felipe is a hacker, an expert in the early days of computers, and he has been hired by a wealthy businessman to find witnesses to a murder. Not because he wishes to solve the murder, but rather because he wishes to cover it up...
With a permanent reminder of the war in the shape of a fragment of his helmet permanently lodged in his skull, it's a tough task for Felipe to forget the war entirely. However, the path to the names his employer requires leads Felipe back to old friends and enemies, forcing his overwrought mind to confront memories he'd much rather forget. No matter how much he twists and turns, the road always leads back to the place a part of him never really left - las Malvinas...
The Islands, the latest in And Other Stories' wonderful selection of literature in translation, is a slightly confronting book for an Englishman. As mentioned above, I still have vivid, if somewhat confused, memories of the war, and to see it re-imagined through Argentinian eyes can be a little unnerving. An early chapter in which Felipe creates a computer game rewriting the outcome of the war, with British ships sunk at will and soldiers slaughtered on the cold, unforgiving expanses of Goose Green, is positively disturbing. The reality, of course, is that this is just what Felipe wishes had happened...
This quickly passes though, and the further Felipe delves into the case he has been given, the less the story becomes about the wider events of the war and more about the lasting effect it has had on the unfortunate veterans. Like all the old soldiers, Felipe is damaged, desperate to seek refuge in cyberspace, drug-fuelled dreams or sexual encounters - unfortunately, he is still unable to escape the pull of the Islands, which have become a piece of him. Looking back on his time in uniform, he says:
"How could those simple girls from the neighbourhood or school, sometimes barely groped at a dance or beneath a burnt-out lamp post, compete with the Islands? As the letters arrived - or didn't - from the mainland, or when we were defeated by the effort of reconstructing a face and body in that jealous and ruthless land, we gradually realised we were surrendering them in return for a greater love."
While Felipe understands that to move on he needs to get away from his past, his friends prefer to live there. Whether meeting to prepare for the next invasion or constructing a scale model of the Islands in a cellar, they refuse to move on, threatening to pull Felipe back into his time in the army. This glorification of the conflict sickens Felipe:
"...however hard I tried, I couldn't forgive them for always talking about the war as some longer, more exciting version of a school-leavers' trip..."
Gradually we learn the reality of what happened from Felipe's dreams, the descriptions of the hellish battles and the mind-numbing waiting. Counting minutes to get through the day, soaked, freezing, not caring about the war, just wanting to go home...
The first half of the book didn't convince me totally. Things took a good while to get moving, and the two strands didn't really seem to connect much for the first two hundred pages. The scenes in Tamerlán's tower (including some rather unusual forms of father-son discipline...) seem over the top, shocking for the sake of being shocking. There is also a section where Felipe searches for the people on the list, a meandering journey around the city which had me skim-reading and yawning a little.
The first half of the book didn't convince me totally. Things took a good while to get moving, and the two strands didn't really seem to connect much for the first two hundred pages. The scenes in Tamerlán's tower (including some rather unusual forms of father-son discipline...) seem over the top, shocking for the sake of being shocking. There is also a section where Felipe searches for the people on the list, a meandering journey around the city which had me skim-reading and yawning a little.
However, once we get deeper into the book, and the two strands start to come together, it becomes a lot more interesting. In fact, the more we ignore what is happening in the outside world and retreat inside Felipe's head, the better The Islands becomes. Gamerro treats us to wonderful swirling passages of cocaine rushes and flashbacks, blurring the lines between past and present, memory and reality (if there are any such lines...). Felipe's return to the mental institution he was once imprisoned in, simply turning up and not having the energy to leave again, is one of a number of excellent pieces of writing in the second half of the book.
Great credit must also go to the translator, Ian Barnett, for the job he's done on The Islands. The original uses a mix of Spanish and English at times, making a clear translation imperative. There are also several passages where one of Felipe's comrades spouts non-stop gibberish, sounds corrupted from the original language, but close enough to enable a listener to reconstruct the real text. Translating this nonsense into English while leaving it close enough to something that makes sense must have been a mighty task :)
Gamerro's language games don't stop there though. Fausto Tamerlán, the superhuman villain, has obvious connections to Goethe's soul-selling character, and also to the famous Muslim leader Tamerlane - a mighty king whose love for the arts is only matched by his willingness to slaughter. And only a cynic would name his hero Felipe Félix - there's nothing lucky about this poor soldier...
...and that's what it all boils down to. While Felipe came back, it would be hard to call him a survivor. For the defeated, the war is an open wound - nobody came back whole.
For the losers, the war is never really over..."It isn't true there were survivors. There are two bites torn out of the hearts of every one of us, and they're the exact shape of the Islands."
