Fellow prisoners 

JOSHUA BILLINGS 

Andrei' Makine HUMAN LOVE

Translated by Geoffrey Strachan 256pp. Sceptre. £ 12.99. 

978 0 340 93677 I 

Andrei Makine's Human Love (which was first published in France in 2006 as L'Amour humain) contains little love and much inhumanity. The world of the novel is brutal and chaotic, infected by war and tyranny. In it, love appears only as a respite, temporary and fragile, from the pervasive insanity of history. "The essential thing", the third-person narrator writes, "was this love, and that was what was missing from this world." Here, "this love" is the love of Elias, an African revolutionary, for Anna, a Siberian student. The two meet during Elias's training (or indoctrination) in Moscow, and are pulled apart when Elias returns to fight in Angola, his home country, leaving Anna to marry an ambitious apparatchik. Throughout his bloody career as a Marxist freedom fighter, Elias imagines two possibilities of redemption: through his love for Anna, and through the continuing struggle for economic justice. The two are mutually exclusive. Elias's dream of a quiet life in Siberia would mean a retreat from the fight that has defined him. "This love" and "this world" are irreconcilable.
Like his main character, Makine crosses worlds, making his life (in Paris) far from the culture of his upbringing (in Siberia), and writing in French. His fiction attempts to reconcile the two places, exploring the powers and vagaries of memory. He returns again and again to the question of how an individual can deal with the past while also trying to carve out a life in the present. This is the narrator's struggle in his earlier, plainly autobiographical novel Le Testament francais (1995), which won the Prix Goncourt. In it, a Russian emigre to France recalls the fantastic stories of Paris told by his grandmother, while at the same time chronicling the ugly realities of life during the Russian Revolution and two world wars. Through recollecting his grandmother's journey from France to Russia, the narrator tries to define his own place between the two countries. Memories are the scaffolding on which Makine builds his stories; they haunt the inner lives of his characters.
His protagonists are often presented at an angle, seen in short glimpses, and constructed through fragmentary recollections. Human Love is told by an unnamed writer and revolutionary, who meets Elias in a Congolese jail in the 1970s, and encounters him at intervals over the next twenty years. The novel's scope is panoramic, even fora writer of Makine's ambition. He handles the complex narrative deftly, skipping backwards and forwards in time, crossing and re-crossing oceans, but always remaining focused on one compelling character. In the fluid translation of Geoffrey Strachan, Makine's prose is never less than lyrical; the I narrator's voice neatly balances ironic detachment and passionate belief.
The love story at the heart of Human Love, however, feels tired. The clash of love and historical events, a typical Makine theme, here seems obligatory. The description of the time Elias and Anna spend together is too thin to counterbalance a numbing succession of brutal scenes, and even these seem stereotyped, building on familiar cliches of African politics. Makine's gift is to illuminate an individual character through the delicate play of memory and experience. Here, the weight of historical events proves too great for consciousness ever to transcend them.