Sabra Zoo [Paperback]

It's 1982 and we see the Israeli siege of Beirut and the shocking events which followed through the eyes of 18-year-old Ivan, half Palestinian and half Danish, whose parents have already left. Ivan is in many ways a typical boy/man - getting drunk and stoned nightly, lusting after an older woman, desperate to lose his virginity - but in this novel, context is everything. Working as an interpreter in the Sabra camp hospital, and as a courier of fake documents for the PLO - his father a former cadre - his friends are not the usual teenager's friends, his flat is the hangout for a ragtag of international medical volunteers. I like the understated tone of the narrative, the lack of hyperbole, the small moments of humour. There is a lovely recurrent image of a candle in a Chianti bottle - so ordinary and everyday. As the camp massacre unfolds - as we know it must - and the horrors pile up sentence after sentence, you want to look away - like Ivan, uncomprehending and stunned - but you can't, you keep reading. A novel like Sabra Zoo is important, educating through fiction, fleshing out events which we as readers may not usually wish to 'revisit', but through Ivan we must. This is the power of fiction. And there is hope at the end. I was left with a lump in my throat, and wanting to know how the characters were doing, long after the last page.

Closing 'Sabra Zoo' and looking up after reading the last page, the world seems different somehow. The things that seemed to matter before no longer matter. They take on the irrelevant incongruity of the air stewardess' perfume or the sachet containing a moist towelette that Mischa Hiller describes... after having led you through the hell of war torn Beirut. Hell created by human beings for other human beings, for no discernable reason. Hell that seems to have its own unstoppable momentum, impervious to the futile efforts of the indviduals caught in its path. But Hiller takes us through this hell - presumably having lived through it himself - with an elegant detachment that only heightens the horror. Perhaps this detatchment is a prerequisite for the casual courage required for ordinary people to live through wartime - living in suspicion of every parked car, in fear of every creak on the stairs, even of your old school friends; going about your shopping, ignoring the Israeli soldiers who have appeared overnight - crouching, twitchily in doorways. And through the fear and the chaos, the normal urges of life continue - hunger, thirst, friendship, a Donovan record on the turntable, craving for a cigarette, a young man's libido searching for an outlet, love... It's the small details that bring the reality of life in wartime home to you; the cockroaches being shaken from the ceiling as Israeli bombs make the building shudder, men casually shooting at a barrel floating off the beach, a stray dog injured by shrapnel... There were other details of the massacre at Sabra refugee camp which I'm ashamed to say, I didn't even have the courage to read. Mischa Hiller had the courage not only to face these details, but to relive them and write about them. By doing so, Hiller opens our eyes to the everyday reality of horror. The Beirut war is over, but the refugee camps still exist. And the horror still exists, in Palestine, in the DRC, in Sri Lanka, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Burma, in Zimbabwe, in Darfur... If anything can stop us turning away from such horrors and shrugging 'what can we do?' it is books like this.

Mischa Hiller's debut novel, winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for Europe and South Asia, is set in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War. The main protagonist of the story is eighteen-year-old Ivan, half Danish and half Palestinian who, although he could have left Beirut when his parents were evacuated, decides to stay and work undercover for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). When Ivan is not working as a courier for the PLO, he spends most of his day working as an interpreter for international medical volunteers in the Sabra refugee camp, where he meets a varied cast of characters including Youssef, a camp orphan disabled by a cluster bomb and Youssef's physiotherapist, the attractive Norwegian, Eli. At night Ivan spends his time drinking, smoking, socialising with friends and colleagues, whilst desperately trying to start a sexual relationship with the older and more experienced Eli. Ivan starts to enjoy his new-found independence but, when a cadre of the PLO needs to use his flat as a safe house, Ivan's life becomes more dangerous as he lives on a knife-edge, juggling his day to day life at the refugee camp with his courier work, whilst continually looking over his shoulder for would-be assassins.

In many ways this novel is a coming of age story that works on more than one level; it is quite amusing to see that whilst Ivan is trying to live up to his father's reputation and expectations and become a man, he is at the same time getting childish pleasure out of making an impressive candle wax build up on his Chianti bottle. However, as we progress through the novel we see tensions slowly build and, as Ivan is chased through the streets of Beirut by a former colleague turned informer and ends up hiding in fear of his life covered in filth in a chicken run, he starts to realize that the glamour of his secret life "isn't John Le Carre" and that "Smiley's people hadn't wandered around ...without enough money to buy a cup of coffee".

In the final part of the story, when the president-elect is assassinated and a faction of the Israeli armed forces enters Beirut, the resultant chaos and carnage force Ivan to make important decisions about his country, his beliefs, his life and his future. There are some very graphic scenes in this section of the novel where men, women and children are violated, butchered and killed and these descriptions are difficult to read; however this tragic moment in history, like many others, needs to be retold, and Mischa Hiller's novel does a very good job at doing just that.

4 Stars.