Fiction:In modern-day Orap - a thinly-veiled Afghanistan - a new regime winds the clock back to the year zero. Marguerite - an Orapian woman raised in Ireland and the US - is imprisoned, gang-raped and tortured for a minor infringement of the country's strict Islamic laws. Pregnant and sentenced to death by stoning, she preserves her sanity by telling her unborn child - the "baby zero" of the title - of three previous baby zeros, herself, her mother and her sister, and of their experiences as wealthy Orapians turned refugees and prisoners.
Emer Martin's first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year at Listowel Writer's Week in 1996 for its treatment of dispossession and despair among down-and-outs in Paris. This, her third, explores the uncertainties of the post-9/11 world, addressing the conflict between Islam and the West and the problems of immigration and assimilation through the "river within a river" that is Marguerite's story.
Marguerite tells of her mother's former career as a midwife, of her brother and sister's escape to the US following revolution, and of her own birth in a refugee camp. As she details the realities of immigrant life both in Ireland and the US, she finds parallels between the latter and the country of her birth. In both, the past has been re-written, one by genocidal settlers, the other by fanatical Muslims. She recounts how her siblings were told: "We're all Americans now. Americans ignore their past." It is, Martin suggests, a dangerous creed - one that evokes Santayana's famous warning that "he who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it".
If the author's view of Ireland is more favourable, it is not uncritical - "If you walk down the street alone, the Irish will kill you" - and the funeral of an Orapian murdered because of race and religion serves as a salutary reminder of the Irish capacity to forget their own experiences of diaspora and exile.
Indeed Martin's own situation - as an Irish woman married to an Afghan man - makes her uniquely placed to address such fraught issues, and this insight elevates Marguerite's tale into a subtle exploration of the role of history and memory in the construction of identity: "You know you're in trouble when the Iranians think you treat women badly."
Martin delights in subverting the glib stereotypes of East and West and rejects traditional markers of nationality, identity and ethnicity in favour of a focus on individuals and the similarities between them. Viewed from this perspective, contemporary tensions are nothing more than "the same Cowboy and Indian story over and over again in different costumes, in different locations". Baby Zerois both a convincing tale and a timely warning.
Freya McClements is a writer and journalist
Baby Zero By Emer Martin Brandon, 314pp. €14.99
