Anouar Benmalek: The child of an ancient people

Picture / Paul Estcourt

If you are housebound on a cold Auckland summer's day this may be the book for you. Which is, and isn't, a recommendation of sorts.

On the plus side, The Child of an Ancient People is short, action-packed and sometimes nail-bitingly exciting. And, fortunately for a wuss like me, it has a happy ending: it tells me so in the prologue.

It is also a rather weird book.

Written by an Algerian and translated from the French, it is set in the late 19th century and describes the adventures of an Algerian Arab (Kader), a Frenchwoman (Lislei) and an Aborigine boy (Tridarir).

Kader and Lislei meet by chance after escaping from their respective prisons in New Caledonia (to where they had been deported: he because of the war in Algeria; she because of the Commune uprising in Paris) and make their way to Australia on a smugglers' ship. From the ship they rescue Tridarir who had been held captive. He is the sole survivor of the Tasmanian Aboriginal genocide.

After the harrowing journey at sea — accompanied by murder and mayhem — the three set out on an interminable trek through the dust, heat, flies, bush and desert of Northern Queensland seeking Tridarir's kinsfolk. There is rape, murder and savagery along the way.

I found this book to be incongruent not only in the language — such jarring phrases as "one eye aflame with suffering and the other with anger" — but also in the way the dramatic scenes are interspersed with dreams of guilt and
former happiness. Kader, with concerns about his cowardice, Lislei about her guilt for becoming separated from her cousin in Paris, and Tridarir, who strives to retain the dreams that his parents taught him and that connect him to his ancestors.

The language is often poetic and quite beautiful, but it can become too tense and emotive. Someone is always choking with or being crushed by anger, sorrow, terror or despair. Some of this can probably be blamed on the translator: "prepare your soul to bite the dust ..."

Although the author portrays the brutality and harshness of those times — and the sickening inhumanity and cruelty with which Aborigines were treated — with a convincing realism, his three main characters are never credible.

They appear to be there more as vehicles for the storyline and to reinforce the underlying theme of colonisation. Kader comes from Algeria, which has been colonised by the French, and the white settlers in Australia are in the process of wiping out the Aborigines. Two days after reading the book I could not have described them as individuals.

Oh yes, and there is some romance — again we know from the prologue that they live happily until old age — but for most of the book they are hurling such insults as "murderer" and "prostitute" at each other. The romance, then, was inevitable.

* Louise Nisbet-Smith is an Auckland reviewer.

* Vintage, $26.95