For Hanna X, there is no memory of life before the suffering and humiliation begin. As a child in an orphanage, as a servant, as a woman hoping for a new life, as a fugitive intent on revenge, only hardship greets her, that and tiny moments of hope.
This is a devastating portrait of a woman's life that includes her many deaths. It is shocking and brutal, it is also quite an astonishing performance from South African André Brink. Written with an assurance that matches his finest novel, Rumours of Rain, which was shortlisted for the 1978 Booker prize, this new novel, his 15th, is his most profound and most beautiful. An urgency and unsettling compassion shape the narrative, the reader feels outraged on Hanna's behalf.
Always a craftsman, and at times an inspired reader of his country's history as a metaphor, well capable of exploring sexuality and racism - as in An Instant in the Wind (1976) - there is often a bluster about Brink the storyteller. His fictions can prove heavy-handed, laboured and curiously masculine. This time, however, he impresses through the subtle understanding and unexpected sensitivity he brings to his portrayal of powerlessness in a brutally cruel tale.
The word "beautiful" initially sounds perversely out of place. The opening pages of The Other Side of Silence are so relentlessly graphic in their descriptions of the ongoing humiliations and serial torments inflicted upon Hanna as to make the novel an initially difficult and demanding read. In Hanna, he has created not a heroine, but an ordinary, decent person who is consistently brutalised emotionally and physically. Beyond her mildness and passivity, there lies an interior world of spirit and imagination. Brink never makes the mistake of idealising her; instead, he allows her to respond to her increasingly worsening situations. It is a compelling characterisation, a study of a simple girl who, from her earliest years in a Bremen orphanage, is denied any sense of identity.
Central to the novel is not only Hanna's dilemma, but also the appalling treatment of women. Yet Brink avoids making it a polemic; the men are cowardly, brutal and without honour, the women are victims, yet the story is neither a cliché nor a melodrama. Instead, it develops into the most unlikely adventure; and, most importantly, Brink creates a terrifying study of the power of hatred and the desire for revenge.
Abused as a child, Hanna, who learns early in life that she is not beautiful and is to be regarded as merely a thing of which use is to be made by men, often takes refuge in a dream world of ideas. The story evolves through a highly effective flashback technique that floats, dream-like, between the given moment and Hanna's present life as an adult woman recovering from a near fatal beating that includes extensive mutilation with gentler interludes.
Many of these are born in the few instances of hope she encounters: a kindly teacher with her own tragic story, then a young woman with whom she becomes close only to see her dead body buried at sea, later she meets a girl in whom she sees her younger self. The most effective are lyric, plaintive retreats into Hanna's imagination.
The wind. The wind always comes from somewhere else. At night in the orphanage, slowly retreating from the edge of death, she lies listening to the comforting sound of her friend, the wind. She must have been very small when she first became aware of it.
Even when her innocent belief in the wind as her friend is dismissed as nonsense by the harsh matron of the orphanage, Hanna continues to believe in it; "ever since then she has been thinking about going on a journey to find out where the wind comes from. The far side of the wind would also be the other side of silence." What appears as a minor little passage in a novel of immense terror assumes significance. Brink displays skill and grace in the many set pieces in what is an episodic narrative. Hanna's life adventures are varied. She encounters many varieties of the unpleasant side of human nature, both male and female, before she ever leaves her native city of Bremen. Yet, ironically, it is when attempting a flight into a new life in the colony of German South-West Africa that there is her real tragedy. Having briefly found and equally quickly lost love, she then discovers she has lost her identity. It is as if Hanna X, who has already lost her name, never existed. When she insists that her friend who has died is not her, is not Hanna X, she is told, "I really could not care less . . . just leave me in peace and accept that Hanna X is dead and buried." Ghosts, deaths and rebirths are important motifs.
While the world of the Bremen orphanage and various households she is despatched to as servant are well described, at times with an effective restraint, the novel grows in power in the African sequences. The desert becomes yet another prison, most dramatically in the form of the bizarre women's compound, the Frauenstein, the Woman Rock, a dark fortress in the desert, "set in an Old Testament landscape, a moonscape, a dreamscape". There reside unwanted women held as captives should any soldier need sexual relief. Hanna's arrival there follows an appalling attack on a train. It leaves her disfigured, destined to endure repeated rejections.
There are many reasons why this novel succeeds. It has a Conradian force; horror and humanity walk hand in hand throughout it. Brink's inspired use of a fragment of history, which he says had remained in his imagination for some 20 years, develops into an eloquent account of a bizarre courage and an even stranger journey towards survival and acceptance.
True, there are flaws: at times the dialogue sounds too contemporary for a work set in the early 20th century, but then the narrative, written in a continuous present tense, is filtered through the account of an author who is in the act of reconstructing a mystery. Also, the sheer detail of the exchanges between Hanna, whose tongue has been cut out, and the young Katya defy even the telepathy Brink ascribes them. The sheer misogynistic crudity of most of the white men may shock, even repel. Still the prose is elegant, often lyric.
Battered, brutalised and courageous, Hanna emerges not as a saint but as a victim, if ultimately a survivor. Not only is this a dramatic and emotive work, it is one individual's odyssey toward a hard won freedom of self . It could well be Brink's most artistically complex and complete achievement.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Other Side of Silence. By Andre Brink. Secker, 211pp, £16.99
