FictionReviewA musicologist’s adventures in the Middle East make for a powerful scholarly narrativeAn Austrian musicologist lies in bed all night worrying about his health, fitfully dreaming, and relating his past scholarly adventures in the Middle East in disordered flashback. At the centre of his lucubrations is a fellow academic named Sarah, with whom he is desperately in love. Such is the scheme of the French writer Mathias Énard’s latest novel, which won the Prix Goncourt and has now been longlisted for the Man Booker international prize, perhaps not least because its politics are highly topical.
Orientalism is, here, the key idea – our narrator, Franz, has worked on the appropriation of Middle Eastern music by canonical westerners, as well as music written by Middle Eastern composers in the western tradition. Sarah, meanwhile, specialises in ideas of the Orient in history. Franz relates at great length their conversations and his own trains of thought about where this artist went and who that artist knew and what painting or musical performance that other artist witnessed, playing a kind of endless game of six degrees of separation between European and Middle Eastern cultural figures of the past two centuries. Fascinating though the facts often are, the scores of pages of this kind of thing are mainly rendered in detailed precis: there is very little direct speech in the novel, which helps to evoke the febrile meanderings of insomniac memory but it also threatens to send the reader, if not Franz, off to merciful sleep.
At length the novel reveals its central cultural and political argument, which is that the famous critique of Orientalism in Edward Said’s eponymous book, and its subsequent reverent reception, may have unfortunately helped to buttress that idea of “the Orient” as something inscrutable and other. In fact, as Franz argues, the Orient is an imaginary construction for east and west, a joint enterprise of consensual hallucination and fecund source of inspirations; Europe itself is a “cosmopolitan construction” of both sides. Beheadings by fanatics in Syria, Franz points out to himself, are as horrific and alien to a Turk or an Iranian as they are to an Austrian aesthete.
The novel is also a love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East of the narrator’s professional travels in Syria and Iran, contrasted with his present sadness at the news from places such as Aleppo, where he had once spent fine times with other academics and artists, drinking and talking. One scene blends into another almost imperceptibly over the course of Franz’s reminiscences, and there is nothing driving a plot. The narrative suspense depends entirely on the author’s unashamedly deployed prolepsis and withholding of information: Franz mentions repeatedly a shameful episode with Sarah, or a horrible journal article he has been sent, and it is only hundreds of pages later that the reader is allowed to know the details. When they are revealed, they are all the more powerful for being such rare doses of ordinary literary pleasure.
The author could certainly, if he had chosen, have written a different novel: one less intent on formally mimicking the pains of lengthy rumination and less determined to demonstrate the pleasures of erudition. There is material here, for instance, for a brilliant tragicomic cosmopolitan campus novel. One characterful fellow academic, a hedonistic opium-smoker, is described as “an entomologist of despondency”.
Quite late on there is an extended passage of direct, dramatic writing, which is quarantined off from the main fuzzy remembrances by being presented as an email that Franz wrote to Sarah but never sent. It is the scene of a terrible confession by another academic friend of theirs, and superbly effective (in Charlotte Mandell’s translation, which is excellent throughout). Arguably too rarely dispensed, also, is the book’s comedy: Franz has a few enjoyably sardonic one-liners (“God is the great enemy of sheep”; “What an atrocity, to think that some people find dreaming pleasant”), and there is a nice running joke about his relationship with his sarcastic doctor, who at one point says to him: “Ah, Dr Ritter, happy to see you here. When you’re cured or dead I’ll be terribly bored.”
As a literary genre, the stream-of-consciousness epic is by now rather old and conservative, even though new versions are regularly hailed as daringly experimental. Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static political and cultural essay – at least until the final few pages, when, miraculously, real-time events intrude upon Franz’s reverie, and the book concludes with a surprisingly upbeat, if not sentimental, flourish. As the dawn does for our sleepless hero, this comes as a relief to the reader, who emerges from this strangely powerful work as from a feverish dream.
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