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Book: 'Bone Ash Sky': Unravelling the complex thread of love and con

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  • Book: 'Bone Ash Sky': Unravelling the complex thread of love and con

    Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
    June 29, 2013 Saturday
    First Edition


    Unravelling the complex thread of love and conflict
    Fiction

    Review by Claire Scobie

    BONE ASH SKY
    Katerina Cosgrove
    Hardie Grant
    400pp

    At the start of Bone Ash Sky, Katerina Cosgrove writes, "The author
    does not seek to blame, defame or offend any race ... There are no
    villains in this story - and no heroes either." What follows is an
    unravelling of four generations of war in the Middle East told through
    the multifaceted lens of one family.

    The book starts in 1995 with Anoush Pakradounian, who is returning to
    Beirut to try to find out the truth about her late father, Selim. Of
    Christian Armenian descent, Anoush left the city aged 16, at the
    height of the civil war, and was brought up in Boston. Now an aspiring
    journalist, she is back to attend a United Nations tribunal accusing
    her father, formerly a commander of the Christian Phalangist militia,
    of taking part in a massacre of Palestinian Muslims. While Anoush is
    singlehandedly trying to right the wrongs of the past, she can never
    get away from her own "secret war, lodged deep inside", that of a
    daughter wanting to love her absent father and yet condemn him for his
    actions.

    As the narrative zigzags back and forth between characters, countries
    - Lebanon, Turkey and Syria - and times, the author takes us deep into
    the Christian-Muslim conflict that ravages the region. Parallel to
    Anoush's journey is the story of her Armenian Christian grandmother,
    Lilit, and Lilit's brother, Minas, both of whom were forced from their
    homes in eastern Turkey in 1915 during the Armenian genocide. The
    scenes of massacres, forced marches and Minas' escape from the death
    camp in Deir ez Zor are harrowing.

    Every war crime known to man or woman happens in this book. It is a
    litany of sadness and trauma, yet within this are the humane details
    of ordinary life and love. Some of the most poignant sections are in
    Beirut - almost a character in itself. At one point, Cosgrove writes:
    "The Israelis are still squeezing the south like an orange, with
    Hezbollah fighting them for pips." Despite everything, Beirut never
    loses its soul.

    In this novel, in which each character is haunted by the past,
    Cosgrove shows how everybody is "a victim or a perpetrator. Or both at
    the same time." We meet the swaggering Selim, Anoush's father and
    Minas' son, who in the early 1980s is carving a place for himself in
    the Phalange headquarters in Beirut. By day Selim schmoozes with
    Israeli commanders; by night he crosses to the west of the city to
    sleep with his Muslim mistress, Sanaya, whose defiance in the face of
    daily airstrikes only adds to her fading beauty.

    And Cosgrove, the Australian author of The Glass Heart and Intimate
    Distance, doesn't stop there. There is Issa, a young passionate Shiite
    Muslim, and Chaim, a disaffected Israeli, who becomes Anoush's
    partner.

    Cosgrove writes poetically about brutality. Her sentences are sparse
    and her imagery fierce: "Skeleton bones, shreds of yellow skin,
    reddish in places."

    Her attempt to cover all sides of the spectrum, the depth of the
    research and fearlessness in writing about subjects such as the 1915
    Armenian genocide - still denied by Turkish scholars - is truly
    commendable.

    However, it is a brave author who switches between first and
    third-person point of view with such a cast of characters. The regular
    unspooling of the past can intrude upon the narrative; at times the
    plot is unwieldy and the prose repetitious. Although Anoush, written
    in the present tense and first-person voice, appears to be the main
    character, I found her the hardest to engage with. In comparison, the
    young Lilit, sold as a slave to a Turk, and the tormented Minas,
    shimmer off the page.

    As the novel builds to a climax, and the disparate family ties
    stretching from past to present are woven together, Cosgrove's own
    agenda becomes more forthright. This can detract from the final
    chapters, but ultimately I was left with a sense that this powerful
    story is a timely and impassioned plea for a better world, where
    cross-cultural and inter-religious divide no longer exists. I can only
    hope that is so.

    Claire Scobie's novel will be published in July by Penguin.

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