APEIROGON – COLUM MCCANN – REVIEW

To pass on a patronymic is to name a child after a father. Ask someone today about this system and they are perhaps most likely to think of Iceland and the suffixes of -son and -dottir, but patronymic naming has left a footprint almost all over the world. Just look at the UK, where the Prime Minister’s surname originates from someone who would have been, back in the day, the son of John.

In the Middle East, the cradle of the three great monotheistic religions, patronymic names are also common. In Hebrew, the form ben or bat, that is the son of, remains in place in religious life even if family surnames are more common in the secular sphere. On the other side of the wall, in Arabic, ibn or bin holds the same meaning. Aramaic, the language of Jesus, also embraced the convention, and it even lingers into the Bible, where the book of Matthew has Jesus referring to the disciple Simon Peter as bar-Jonah.

There is another habit too in this part of the world, not so formal, but perhaps more revealing.

To have a kunya is to be known by the name of your oldest child. A kunya can be metaphorical, as in a nom de guerre – Palestinian Abu Nidal, founder of the Fatah is the ‘father of struggle’. It can relate to a trade or talent which the bearer masters to the extent to which he becomes its metaphorical father. The first Rashidun Caliph, and the father-in-law of the prophet Muhammed, for example, is known as Abu Bakr not for his actual offspring but for his affinity with camels. Most commonly of all, a kunya can also be literal, renaming a parent according to their child. In the Islamic world, my father would be Abu Edward. His identity would be literally as well as figuratively tied to mine. A parent cannot separate their life from their child’s.

It follows that to lose a child is to lose a part of your identity. It is that shared loss that is at the centre of Apeirogon by Colum McCann.

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Apeirogon, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, focuses on two fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli. Both men have fought in their youth. Rami served in the Israeli Defence Force. Bassam graduated from throwing stones to tossing faulty grenades, an act which earned him a stretch in prison. Both have grown, as adults, into a love of peace. The Jew denounces Israel’s aggression, the Muslim learns the horrors of the Holocaust. They share a belief in ending the occupation and preoccupation, in ending the vicious pursuit of eyes for eyes which is making their region ever blinder. Both also come to share something more tragic. Both lose a part of themselves the day their daughters are claimed by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The tales of their Arabian and Jewish nights, afternoons and mornings are told in a thousand and one non-chronological chapters, some as short as one line long.

Alongside the story of Rami and Bassam’s trauma and friendship is a dazzling array of complementary background information. From Francois Mitterand’s last meal to Irish missionary Christopher Costigan’s doomed attempt to navigate the river Jordan, and the burning and reconstruction of the Saladin pulpit in the Al-Aqsa mosque, the novel glues past and present together, builds up the sides that make up the novel’s shape.

It should be hard to follow, a disruptive reading experience, but somehow it keeps trickling forward. Painstakingly, and with extraordinary skill, McCann reassembles his pulpit piece by piece, maintaining the cadence, pace and plot throughout. The use of recurring motifs helps maintain flow. Water and drought bubble and hiss. Silence and music both roar in their different ways, the latter to undermine and be undermined. The clash of natural sound against the unnatural is another refrain, bulldozers, sirens, the vacuum hiss of the morgue door. There is nothing natural about the state of relations between Israel and Palestine. There is nothing natural about occupation or war.

Birds are perhaps the most prominent of all, soaring through the novel in the songs they sing, in the crushed, boiled bones of the ortolan being illegally inhaled by the dying president of France, in a pigeon cum dove released on a tightrope. This is a land of both fight and flight, one with walls and checkpoints and patrols. Birds cross borders more easily than people.

The structure of the book is bird shaped too. 500 chapters of one wing count up to the body, the talks Bassam and Rami give around the world. Five hundred more chapters of the other wing count down.

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On one level, Apeirogon is a hymn to grief, a constant echoing reminder of the awfulness of Israel and Palestine’s shared trauma on human fathers and mothers, and sisters and brothers. To paraphrase a memorable line from the novel, the book is molecular in its vision of suffering and pain. It brilliantly and brutally exposes the depths of pettiness, cruelty and above all dehumanisation that people wander towards willingly or are sent to by war and segregation.

The imbalance of power and military capability is not shied away from, but the novel is strongest in recounting how even perpetrators do not escape the heat of the blast. As Bassam longs to say to his daughter’s killer, kept anonymous and criminally unaccountable by the Israeli state, “you are the victim here, not me.” Whether it’s David slaying Goliath, or Goliath slaying David, both are victims as long as the fight continues.

And yet, amid the division there is always hope. Amicable numbers – that is two integers, each one the sum of the factors of the other – remind us of that, instilling the idea that two entities can be divided by different things and reach the same place. At another point, again repeated, the author notes that ‘when you divide death by life you find a circle’. Conflicts do not have winners, just different sets of losers. But equally, when the sum of our divisions is the same, friendship and kinship rather than enmity ought to be the natural order. Reach the end of the division and we might find more in common than we think.

That hopefulness trills like a zaghrouta – the high-pitched ululation sound common at Arabic weddings and also performed during the Super Bowl by Shakira – begging readers to celebrate shared virtues and values, putting out a call to arms against arms.

To take perhaps the most binary of the book’s motifs and elaborate, peace is a tightrope walk. If you are walking a tightrope, it doesn’t matter if you fall off to the left or the right, to one side of a partition or the other. The result is the same. You fall. Staying on requires balance, patience, the ability to stop and pause, but always with an eye on progress.

That’s where the novel’s name comes in. An Apeirogon is a mathematical shape with a countably infinite number of sides. To be countable is to be knowable, accountable. Without accountability, whether for states or individuals, there can be no peace, the novel argues.

An Apeirogon’s sides are visible as long as we look closely enough. Seek peace hard enough, the book argues, and it can be found. But if we consider peace uncountable or if our devotion is not sincere enough to count towards infinity, we will never discern the true shape of an Apeirogon. Instead of countably infinite progress towards peace, we will be left instead with the uncountably finite costs of war, dehumanisation, violence, a bloody mass of reciprocated atrocities, a broken gift of shards of hope.

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As for the book itself, it walks its own tightrope in more ways than one. Is this fiction or non-fiction? Is it both?

Rami and Bassam are real. Their lost daughters are real too, as are the charities, Combatants for Peace and The Parents’ Circle that the two friends and others advocate to this day. The need to talk, the need to keep counting towards peace. That is the real too. Countable, infinite, but real.