Paperback reviews

For such a beautiful novel, The President’s Gardens begins on a gruesome note. A village in Iraq awakens to find nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of the villagers, some disfigured by torture. To explain how they eventually came to be there, Muhsin Al-Ramli (in a fine translation from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren) tells us the story of three boyhood friends, “the sons of the earth crack”, and of how they fared in the period encompassing the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, the purges which re-established Saddam’s authority after his military misadventuring and the occupation of Iraq by America and her allies. In writing about ordinary Iraqis who pay the cost of wars waged by remote, autocratic leaders, Al-Ramli touches on deep and timeless themes. The human capacity for both nobility and wanton destruction. Pain and healing. The different shades of love. The capriciousness of fate.

The sons of the earth crack were born in 1959, comprising Tariq, who carefully manoeuvres his way through life to attain modest wealth and influence, Ibrahim, who loses his foot in the war and is regarded by his daughter as a pathetic loser, and Abdullah, “the prince of pessimists”, who was held prisoner in Iran for 20 years and learned that “the cruelty of man is more barbaric than any other creature”. Tariq doesn’t actually feature that heavily, but his two comrades are substantial, well-realised creations. The marvellously implacable Abdullah, nicknamed Kafka by his friends, is detached and withdrawn, but is more decent than he realises and needs love and tenderness more than he would ever admit. One strongly sympathises with Ibrahim too, especially after he gets a job in the titular garden and is forced to participate in acts that would freeze the blood.

Death is the enemy here. Not death as the natural conclusion to a life well-lived, but as a symptom of the cruelty and barbarity of the human race. To defy and resist it, people turn to each other, enjoying the “rare and special pleasure” of gathering together over tea, providing support for each other and basking in the warmth of feeling a part of something greater. Both Abdullah and Ibrahim, in their separate ways, retreat into the world of the dead and forget their obligations to the living, but even the last meetings of the sons of the earth crack “would end with a sense of catharsis, the feeling of a man meeting himself”. Similar sentiments are expressed by Ibrahim while working in Saddam’s garden: “He wished there was some way to tenderly embrace one’s soul as though it were another human being.”

By emphasising the dark side of humanity, Al-Ramli celebrates the best of us. Within this awful morass of violence and hatred, there are acts of compassion going on all the time, everywhere. As uplifting as it is grim, The President’s Garden is a consistently compelling novel, and it’s a shock to the system to reach, with no warning, the words “to be continued …” on the final page.

A Jest Of God

Margaret Laurence (Apollo, £10)

A Jest Of God has acquired something of a classic status in Canada since its first publication in 1966, and it’s not hard to see why its female readers welcomed and cherished it. At 34, its protagonist, Rachel Campbell, is unmarried, a primary school teacher who looks after her hypochondriac mother in a passive-aggressive relationship. She has always stayed within the constraints set for her by society, living a life of duty, self-sacrifice and dullness. Inside, though, she chafes against the conformity and a barely-suppressed anger boils within her. Then, at 34, she embarks on her first sexual relationship, which sets her on the path to adulthood. Rachel is not especially likeable (“This newfound ruthlessness exhilarates me,” she thinks when she defies her mother’s wishes to stay in rather than meet her new man), and for the most part this is not a feelgood book, but she’s portrayed with exceptional insight and subtlety in a book which feels relevant still.

The Sport Of Kings

C.E. Morgan (4th Estate, £8.99)

The Forges are an old Kentucky dynasty. Henry Forge and his daughter, Henrietta, are dedicated to the cause of breeding the finest racehorse ever. However, Henry’s passion for careful selective breeding extends to race, and he’s outraged when black groom Allmon Shaughnessy comes to work at their farm and gets involved with Henrietta. But there’s a lot more to The Sport Of Kings than horseracing. Predominantly a family saga encompassing a few decades, its total span, including digressions and flashbacks, is closer to 250 years. It takes place in a land populated by the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave-owners, with only the gay, black jockey Reuben Bedford Walker III claiming to be unencumbered by race and class by virtue of having invented himself. Adorned with rich, florid prose, this is a sprawling, overstuffed, messy and very American novel which fascinates precisely because of its highwire ambition, of Morgan’s intention to aim high at the risk of crashing to earth.

East West Street

Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99)

So central have the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity become to international law that it’s worth being reminded that they were only introduced in the Nuremberg Trials. Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands found a close personal connection when he began researching his maternal grandparents, Jewish refugees from Lviv, nowadays in Ukraine. He discovered that they had practically been neighbours of lawyers Hersch Lauterpacht, who brought the charge of crimes against humanity to Nuremberg (and whose son, coincidentally, taught Sands at Cambridge) and Raphael Lemkin, who dedicated his life to establishing the crime of genocide. Sands explains here how revolutionary these concepts were to traditional ideas of justice and how two persecuted Jews were central to their foundation. Entwining their story with that of his grandparents, he makes a rewarding personal odyssey out of what could have been a dry subject to approach, and gives it a paciness far beyond what one would expect of a book ostensibly concerned with legislation.