Fires in the Dark
Louise Doughty Simon & Schuster, 481pp, £16.99
ISBN 0743220870
The setting is rural Bohemia in 1927. A boy is born in a barn to Anna and Joseph Ruzicka. His Czech name is Franti-ek, his fellow Roma call him Emil, but tradition dictates that his mother will whisper his "real" name in his ear. That name is Yenko. In time, like Jim in J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun, Emil will find himself in a concentration camp as the chaos of war destroys Europe. In the camp, he will be separated from his family and be forced to adopt many guises simply to survive.
This is a sprawling, ambitious novel of growing up and self-discovery during a period of war and conflict. The book is rooted in the author's discovery that her father was part Romany and it is a long way from Doughty's previous psychological thrillers; this time, the murder is of a whole people.
Yenko is born into the Kalderash (coppersmiths) Roma. Before the Second World War, he and his family lead an idyllic existence travelling with their tribe across central Europe, cherry-picking to subsidise their trade in summer. When war breaks out, they flee the German army and increasing persecution, leaving behind those Roma who believe they can sit out the fighting in Bohemia. But Yenko and his family are arrested on their way to Slovakia, and sent to a camp for gypsies at HodonIn. In the camp, Yenko is able to live slightly better than most through becoming the tortured plaything of a sadistic guard. He manages to escape, leaving his family behind (they are sent to Auschwitz). Later, in desperation, he murders two old people for their clothes and food, then smashes up their house and paints the Star of David on the outside, so people will think they are Jews. He reaches Prague, where he finds the cherry farmer who used to employ his family and learns to live as a white man, a gadjo. From his window, he watches the forced deportations of the few remaining Jews left in the city. Eventually, he finds love and a kind of peace.
Fires in the Dark is memorable and gripping. I have seldom before read sentences that evoke so well the beauty of the landscape (the "honesty" of a brilliant blue sky, for instance), or the pain of hunger and cold. Doughty is good on the "heaviness" of hatred and on the guilt of the traumatised survivor. I liked, too, her understanding of how chance can shape our lives. As the Russians near Prague and the locals rise up against the invaders, German ferocity increases. Yenko sees a young girl in the street, her hair in neat plaits. The girl has been murdered, there is a bullet hole in her forehead and two German soldiers are chatting nonchalantly across her stricken body. A few minutes before, she might have chosen to go another way home and thus have survived. "I thought of her mother. Raising a child. Meals to be cooked, lessons to be taught. All that effort wasted because in a moment some soldier twitches his finger and BANG."
The only false note here is, I think, in the camp when Yenko is loading dead bodies from the mortuary wagon for burial. He sees the corpse of a baby that has died "in the act of crying, its eyes screwed tight shut, its mouth frozen in a howl". This is the cliche of the standard murder mystery, where the faces of corpses grimace with horror and dead eyes glare accusingly. In truth, muscles relax after death, and the faces of the dead are invariably calm and ordinary.
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