Fiction: Memory and its army of ghosts continue to shape the elegiac fictions of Andreï Makine. The Siberian-born novelist who fled to France in 1987, where he has since settled, writes in French.
His art, and art it is, is inspired by beauty and informed by history. In common with the great German writer, WG Sebald, whose magisterial vision was abruptly halted by sudden death (although he did leave several major works), Makine is possessed of a singular, philosophical voice. Its tone is gentle, thoughtful, formal and conscious of the legacy of displacement created by war.
In The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme, which was published in France in 2003 and now appears in its English translation, the narrator, a published writer, pursues a quest born of memories shared with him when he was a boy. The storyteller, Alexandra, exiled by war, was an old French woman who had known his parents. Many years earlier she had had a brief wartime romance with a French pilot who had decided to serve Russia. Through her lover she had rediscovered her France, the country she had lost through having stayed in Russia. The airman, Jacques Dorme, had disappeared and, with him, the dreams of the young woman who had become old by the time the narrator met her.
The narrative is subtle and well served by Geoffrey Strachan's astute translation, which catches the music of one man's thoughts. Makine works his way through several changes of tense. The past becomes layered just as Makine's response to language is layered between his native tongue and the language in which he chooses to write. In creating the narrative voice, he deliberately provides us with a man whose thoughts are full; he is reflecting on the role of the novelist as well as story and truth, while also responding to things which have happened. It is both directed and random, as memory consistently intervenes with his present and what happened years earlier.
The narrator's grim post-war childhood was spent in an orphanage. His only respite from this institution came with his weekly visits to Alexandra and the comforts he discovered through her in books and in the French language:
In the course of these visits I had certainly received a French education. But an education without structure, unpremeditated. A book left open on the corner of a table, a Russian word whose French past Alexandra revealed to me . . . The association became so intense that for me many years later the French language would always be evocative of a place and a time that came close to the atmosphere of the childhood home I had never known.
His awareness of Alexandra's sense of self being confined within her "last remaining treasure", the French language, her mother tongue, is beautifully conveyed. As is the day he managed to gain access to a small room, cut off from the rest of the old house, once a great family home, now a boarding house of sorts, by a fire. The room houses the ruined remnants of what had once been a personal library, "piles of books damaged by fire, age and rain. Foreign books especially, useless to the building's residents and saved from their stoves thanks to this room being sealed off".
The novel opens with a prologue recalling the lovers: "The span of their life together is to be so short that everything will happen to them for both the first and last time." Makine evokes the interlude with the skill of a painter. Their love is a moment in time. Mystery complicates the obvious regret. In an attempt to track down the answers, the narrator travels back to Russia, to Siberia, "the five thousand miles of snow" between there and Moscow. It is freezing, but for him, "the goal has been reached". It was here that Jacques Dorme flew over in what proved to be his final mission. "Tomorrow," announces the narrator to himself, "I shall see the place where a life that I have borne within me since childhood came to grief. His life and that of the woman who had loved him."
For him, it is romantic: Jacques Dorme, "whose life story I perceived as a living and luminous whole" symbolises the tragic. However, for the two geologists who are also present, both named Lev, the poignancy is lost. Makine makes sure his reader appreciates the role memory has had in the shaping of the man his narrator became.
Although the narrative voice is characteristically formal, there is also a conversational quality; the narrator might be Makine himself. Both are Russians who left a home that had never been one; both are writers; and here we see the narrator returning back to Russia from a new life in France. Story and truth, invention and fact, slide side by side. The narrator is aware that the changes in post-communist Russia, with their brutal liberalisation and harsh poverty, mean it is no haven:
More than all the other changes, more even than the obscene flaunting of the new wealth, it was this dispersal of a human past that struck me. The feverish speed with which it was being made to disappear.
Siberia makes him forget his "botched homecoming". For all the importance of the quest he has undertaken, this is a book about loneliness. In each of his fictions, Makine always tells a story, yet more importantly he creates a mood, a meditation in which a life is examined.
For the narrator, there are several defining episodes, not least his experience in a Paris publisher's office in which the editorial director, a woman "seated with a lizard's elegance" informs him that the parts of his book concerning the pilot "jars", and she announces: "It's too true for a novel." There are many moments of truth in The Sky and Earth of Jacques Dorme. Among the most dramatic is when the narrator returns to France: not to Paris, where he lives, but to the small northern town which had been home to Dorme and is the birthplace from which he set off to fight in the war.
It is yet another place where change has proved brutal. Vandals now rule. The narrator meets Dorme's brother, now an old man whom, he feels, "senses my purpose: the repatriation of a parcel of history that got lost in the snowy wastes of Siberia". The exchange that follows once again alerts the narrator to the irrefutable differences between being an immigrant and a native.
This is Makine's eighth novel, the fourth published since his fourth book, Le Testament Français (1995), won the Prix Goncourt. Each of his taut, atmospheric works achieve an epic grandeur.
Readers who were mesmerised by the beauty of his seventh book, A Life's Music (2002) - possibly his finest to date - will appreciate that his debut, A Hero's Daughter, which was published in France in 1990 only after Makine said that it had been translated from the Russian, is also exceptional. It was finally published in English last year.
Here is a profound artist blessed with vision, a grasp of history and lyric grace. Andreï Makine, the Russian who writes in French, continues to brings the ease of Chekhov, a balance of the past with the present, and his own limpid allure to the contemporary European novel.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme By Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan Sceptre, 184pp. £16.99
