Pontus Beg is a police commissioner in Michailopol, a fictional small town somewhere in the Russian steppe. As a boy Beg used to dream of being old. For a time he even walked about “with a pair of safety glasses on the bridge of his nose, his hands clasped behind his back . . . More than anything else, he had wanted to be old. Slow and deliberate, a captain calmly facing the storm.” Then he noticed that the glasses left welts on the sides of his nose, so he stopped wearing them. Time marched on.
Beg has finally become old enough, at 53, to be aware of his pains and twinges. He even has a problem with one of his feet, the left one. It always feels cold, “as though the foot belonged to someone else”. He views this development as the beginning of death – “he and his body, growing apart gradually”.
These Are the Names is the 10th novel by the Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa and his fourth book to be translated into English. It is superb. It has won the Libris Prize in the Netherlands and, were it eligible, could really shake up the Man Booker.
Caesarion (2009), which was shortlisted for the 2013 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, earned Wieringa a following among English-language readers. It was a brash, confident coming of age tale with a difference, and it has many admirers, as does Joe Speedboat (2005). These Are the Names will have even more. Film-makers should pounce.
The novel elevates Wieringa's art to a far higher level. His humour is here tempered by a subtle humanity. Not only is Pontus Beg a remarkable study of a man in flux, searching for meaning and hopeful of finding answers in his past, but the story also looks at the nightmare experience of a group of refugees. There are echoes of the great JM Coetzee's elegant irony and, most particularly, of his early classic, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Wieringa balances the public and the private in a parallel quest for survival that is both spiritual, as it is for Beg, and deadly savage, as it becomes for the refugees.
Beg resides in a messy apartment on the edge of the town. He is not quite alone; Zita, his housekeeper, also lives there. They are not a couple; she continues to hold out hope that her fiancee, a truck driver 10 years her junior, will settle down and make her pregnant. An unlikely dream, but she does have new teeth now. Once a month Zita allows Beg to sleep with her. Beg likes Zita and feels comfortable around her, except for her disturbing habit of having marathon conversations in her sleep with her long-dead mother.
It is often funny; Wieringa adopts a kindly empathy towards Beg, who emerges as one of the most likeable figures in recent fiction. Kindly wit undercuts the shaping of this middle-aged cop who has been bruised by his experiences yet retains a very human vulnerability, never quite forgetting the female mystery backpacker whose decayed corpse remains in the town morgue.
Beg wants to belong. As the narrative begins he has, by chance, through the death of one old rabbi, met another man. This second elderly man causes Beg to wonder if his late mother had been Jewish. After all, that old tune she taught him, the one he keeps singing to himself, turns out to be a Jewish love song. Before long Beg is convinced that he is Jewish; this discovery begins to sustain him. “That he belonged somewhere, that was the poignant thing.”
While the many close-ups focus on Beg and his enthusiastic engagement with his long-lost maternal heritage, Wieringa is also evoking a sense of the daily life in the town and of its characters, including drifters who had been elsewhere yet returned. Beg is no saint, yet he is immensely likeable. He remembers the girl he once loved, who encouraged him to read Pushkin and Turgenev. Irritated by his shabby old service car, which his moralising has stuck him with, he attempts to direct his thoughts towards loftier matters. Central to these is the old song he keeps singing as he drives along. He decides to visit his dacha and prepare it for winter. “Sometimes he thought of himself as a landless farmer.”
Ahead of him on the road is a speeding truck. Beg races after it in pursuit, intent on an arrest. The encounter reveals a great deal about Beg’s attitudes and also his awareness of a changing Russia. The offender “was a man of around thirty, wearing jeans, sneakers. The new generation: healthy, haughty, with an almost palpable contempt for authority. They didn’t now how things had been. They had never lacked for a thing; they’d had their bread buttered on both sides.” Beg loses his temper and beats the man viciously, until he senses a warning shot: “Through a crack in his blinded brains came a ray of light: the realisation that he might kill him.”
Nuanced insights
Beg’s characterisation, achieved almost entirely through nuanced insights into his random thoughts and memories (even the bitchy memo he composes), is unusually convincing. He is the kind of man who as he walks into the psychiatric hospital on route to conduct an interview about a severed head notes the sandstone knights decorating the facade: “The realisation that Vienna’s influence once reached all the way to Michailopol never fails to amaze Beg.”
Yet although the distracted if astute police commissioner is a dominant presence, it is the prose and Wieringa’s relaxed style that make this novel so good. The ease of the storytelling, as it moves between the Everyman trials of Beg and the graphic horror of the modern-day Exodus being endured by the refugees, is most impressive.
The two contrasting main stories are well developed. It testifies to Wieringa’s skill that both narratives exist within their own right. When the focus is on Beg the reader is content for it to remain there. When the focus shifts to the surreal ordeal of the lawless refugees it is as if there is no other story waiting to be told, anywhere.
Within pages it becomes clear that this is a rare novel possessed with a sense of place and a purpose. In ways a parable about displacement, encompassing the emotional, the spiritual and the psychological, it has cohesion and urgency, balancing the ordinary with the extreme horrors of a news bulletin.
Sam Garrett’s fluid translation not only renders the exchanges into authentic dialogue but also conveys the natural rhythms of Wieringa’s descriptive prose, as well as the internal tone shifts. Beg’s dreamy musings are juxtaposed with the biblical cruelties being perpetrated on the steppe.
Moving ever closer to this community, with its ordinary crimes and daily evidence of small scams and intrigues, is the group of skeletal, unhinged refugees. Survival breeds desperation and brutality. Somehow they come to see a lone Ethiopian as their enemy and, ultimately, their saviour. The sequences out on the steppe and the subsequent interviews Beg conducts with the damaged survivors are dazzling excursions into the essential ambivalence residing at the heart of great fiction. This is a bravura performance. Far closer to Joseph Conrad than one might expect, it makes a case for the saving power of small continuities.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
