Death is front and centre in Beirut Hellfire Society, but in Hage’s rendering it is as sensual as it is senseless this new work of fiction extends the streak of ab surdity that runs through the author’s previous three books.Īs with Carnival (2012), which follows a taxi driver who experiences the world through encounters with denizens of the urban underclass who are his passengers, and Cockroach (2008), told through the eyes of a despairing thief in Montreal, people who exist on the fringes are at the heart of Beirut Hellfire Society. But it is still very disappointing, especially coming from someone who claims to revere ancient Greece so much.“This is a book of mourning for the many who witnessed senseless wars, and for those who per ished in those wars.” So writes Rawi Hage in the acknowledgements to his fourth novel. Luckily this error is quickly forgotten as the pace picks up and Pavlov’s world becomes more compelling. Most are very minor, but there is one major howler that many readers will immediately pick up on. As often happens, there are some errors in the book. In Beirut Hellfire Society, Hage has produced a unique, thought-provoking, and compelling novel. Pavlov’s meandering thoughts are complex and fascinating. His Beirut comes across as something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell-wild and disturbing, containing a wide variety of tortured souls and any number ways to make them suffer. Hage is nothing if not a very intriguing, articulate writer who is not afraid of taking risks.
Weeks and months pass when nothing happens apart from the numbing routines of war, death, and funerals. comes across as a series of loosely connected vignettes. But these encounters only ever accumulate detail rather than momentum or interest (which can also be a problem with Hage’s awkwardly unfurling sentences). The book is structured as a series of digressions, somewhat in the style of The Arabian Nights, as Pavlov bounces off the oddballs who swerve in and out of his path. But while his novel has episodic pleasures, it never coheres. Hage has some heretical fun with this mix-and-match approach to religious mythology, and he’s obviously declaring his own affinities with the misfits and outcasts of the world. If sectarian identities are intractable and rigid, Hage’s new novel is a parade of deviants. They are caught in a peculiarly Lebanese dilemma: either accept one’s role in a community defined by its antagonism toward others, or else become invisible, impotent, disposable. This usually means a sectarian identity, though Hage is also interested in how his characters define themselves as men (his female characters are notably short on self-reflection).
Hage’s more pointed suggestion is that acts of violence are the result of a person’s embracing a particular identity.
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