Dan Fesperman: The Small Boat Of Great Sorrows

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

This novel delivers a personal view of conflict; not so much in the grisly details of slaughter and genocide but as the unending hangover of non-closure that haunts any individual whose nation has been rent asunder by war. The main character, in a way, is European history and it is as dank, cloying and grimy as the graves — both individual and mass — that litter this superbly woven tale.

Vlado Petric is a Bosnian detective who flees Sarajevo after an anti-corruption mission that nearly takes his life, and joins his wife and child in Berlin. Here they live the thankless existence of refugees: loathed for being different, tolerated for their cheap contribution to rebuilding Berlin's shattered centre. When Calvin Pine, an American working at the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, turns up in the Petrics' shabby apartment and offers Vlado a job tracking down a war criminal, Vlado's love of his homeland and boredom and frustration with his life cause him to accept Pine's offer.

He heads for The Hague, swapping his boiler suit for a bespoke one, and mingling shoulder to shoulder with the chattering diplomatic classes. And then, as he and Pine set off for the Balkans, his world begins to unravel.

It would be churlish to reveal much more of the exceptionally clever plot here, other than to say that Vlado's prey is not just a war criminal from the recent conflict, and that Vlado begins to find out some things about his father that he really didn't expect — or want to.

Spinning through the Balkans, Rome and Naples, chasing past and present war crimes, this book is a highly powered and tightly wound machine, with Fesperman thrilling us with a
terrific, believable and frightening tale of duality, blurred histories and consciences that can be bought and discarded at will. War's chaos provides the wrong sort of people the right sort of opportunities and their actions 60 years on resonate deeply in Vlado's ever-besieged head, mingling with the actions and images of what he has seen in his land's more recent war. "The mass graves. Had there ever been an era when his countrymen hadn't been digging them?" he ponders.

"The key to everything was not so much the past as it was those who had survived it, then
twisted history to their devices," he realises, and "they" have done quite a job on his father's life, which proves to be about as twisted as a life can get.

Add to the unravelling of history the duplicities of the supposed "good guys" at work "protecting" the mess that is the Balkans, and a string of characters so rich and believable that you're hanging on their every action, and you have an intelligent, captivating book that leaves you with the unpleasant reminder that the effects of any war ring long after the last shell has landed. Stirring stuff.

Random House, $26.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland writer