(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
The phrase, “You can never go home again”, lifted from the title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe, is oft cited as proof that the past is somewhere so heavily coloured by nostalgia that viewing in anything like objective terms is all but impossible.
That’s, on the assumption, of course that the past behaves itself and stays, quite politely, in the past, but as we know all too well, it often bleeds messily into the present, something in touchingly graphic display in Leo Vardiashvili‘s novel, Hard by a Great Forest.
In this shockingly amusing piece of work, which invests its black, absurdity humour with some very grim musings on geopolitics, national character and the dysfunctional nature of many families, a man who fled the then-wartorn country of Georgia returns to make peace with the ghosts of his past.
At least, that’s the assumption made by his two grown sons back in London who, watching their father finally leaving on his much-ballyhooed return trip to his homeland, know he will not return.
But when no word comes back from Irakli, who left his ex-wife and his sons’ mother behind when they couldn’t raise sufficient funds to get her out of the country too, Sandro, and the protagonist of Hard by a Great Forest, his younger brother, Saba, fear the worst.
Sandro flies over first, and for a while Saba is kept very much in the loop as his older brother tracks down where their father went and where he might be now.
The city’s littered with memories that await me like landmines. Just enough time has passed to make everything foreign enough. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without any permission. Then there’s the biblical flooding, runaway zoo animals, civic disarray, confiscated passports, missing brothers and fathers. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn’t even bring toothpaste.
But in this story which is searingly, jarringly honest about the darkness of war and the trauma it engenders, not simply at the time but ongoing, while also being funny and full of grim adventure, getting to the truth of a situation, and indeed the people in it, is not easy.
So much so, that when Sandro also worryingly goes quiet, Saba follows in his wake, encountering a country that views its returning citizens with a mix of hostility and bemusement, and which makes fun of the fact that returnees like Saba are more foreigner than Georgian after so long abroad.
While Saba grapples with a myriad of complex, mixed feelings about being back, about what happened to his mother way back when, and his father and brother in the present, he is forced to deal with the fact that a great deal of lingering trauma has long poisoned the well of his family’s life and must be dealt with.
He’s not sure how though; when you have a father whose last email sounds distressingly final – “My boys, I did something I can’t undo. I need to get away from here before those people catch me. Maybe in the mountains I’ll be safe. I left a trail I can’t erase. Do not follow it.” – and a brother who, hounded by corrupt police, has left a trail for Saba to follow (much like the ones they delighted in as boys), making any kind of progress, let alone, peace, won’t be easy.
(courtesy Penguin Random House)
While Hard by a Great Forest is, in many ways, a very dark novel – how can it not be when there is so much war, trauma and loss punctuating the stories of its scarred characters – and there are times when you wonder how anyone survives situations where death and cataclysmic destruction of families, homes and routines is horrifyingly commonplace, it also carries with it a great deal of humour.
Much of that comes courtesy of Nodar, a tax driver, who, along with his wife Ketino, fled Russian-occupied South Ossetia, leaving everything behind save for a great deal of lingeringly corrosive trauma.
For all of their trauma, however, they remain devoted to each other and courteous to Saba, who goes from being just a passenger being taken to a hotel in Tbilisi to a guest of Nodar and his wife (“A guest is a gift from God” is a constantly repeated refrain throughout Georgia, and thus, the book) and almost a member of the family.
Nodar doesn’t simply ferry Saba from point to point to find the next clue from Sandro; he actively gets involved in the search until Hard by a Great Forest almost becomes his story too, showing how no one is ever free from their past, and in a place like Georgia, that past is rarely visited by any kind of reality-distorting nostalgia.
Irakli looks careworn and haggard. His beard grown unruly and hair greyer than I remember. New wrinkles set his face in an expression of worry. He looks a man on the run from no common predator. I stare at him a long time before I can go to bed. It takes even longer to get to sleep. I still haven’t decided on how how or what to say to him tomorrow …
As they work to locate Sandro and Irakli, their banter is rich and funny and wry, infusing Hard by a Great Forest with a comedic vibrancy that you might not think it could possess.
The way in which Nodar and Ketino, and thousands like them, somehow stay upbeat and keep putting one foot in front of the other is remarkable, and speaks to the fact that the human spirit, which can be damaged beyond any sort of reasonable repair, such it was with Irakli and some of Saba’s relatives who stayed behind, is also capable of rising up again and again and remaining positive where everything says it should simply collapse and die.
Rather than being some sort of inspirational fable though, Hard by a Great Forest is more of an emotional intimate and groundedly honest story about how people can persist, somehow and in ways they don’t understand, in the face of so much horror and sadness and grief.
Even Irakli, who cannot let go of the ghosts of his past, somehow still believes he can rescue it somehow or make peace with it, and Nodar and Ketino, in their own ways, hold fast to the idea that particular traumatic part of their story may yet possess some optimism and hope.
It’s remarkable that anyone emerges in such situations with any sense of the future holding anything of value, but somehow they do, but as Hard by a Great Forest, and Saba’s emotionally and physically exhausting journey make clear, there is no road to the future without making peace with the past, a driving force for a funny and heartbreaking novel which sees the past without any sort of nostalgia and knows that it must be put to bed before any steps can truly be made away from it.