Towards Asmara [Paperback]

This novel is set in the real life situation of the would-be independent province of Eritrea fighting a bitter battle for independence from Ethiopia at the end of the 1980s.

Fictional characters and fictional events are entwined in a fascinating tale behind enemy lines with Eritrean guerilla fighters. The narrator is Darcy, a UK based Australian journalist with a mission to visit an Ethiopian fighter pilot being held as a prisoner of war held by the Eritreans after being shot down in his Soviet MiG-23 fighter. Darcy travels with a group of unlikely companions including the young French daughter of a film cameraman who is seeking her father, an aid worker whose motives are not evident at the start of the story, the widowed Lady Julia working for the cause of feminism and a number of Eritrean escorts. The journey brings them face-to-face with the worst atrocities of war including landmines, napalm bombs, fragmentation bombs and of course, machine gun fire. Nature throws up its own challenges too with swarms of locusts enveloping everything in their path. Overland travel is under the cover of dark as there is nowhere to hide in daylight. Schools, hospitals and dwellings are in caves and tunnels, leaving only the crops above ground, which provide a ready target for the enemy fire. The traveling group witnesses the lows of field hospitals served by surgeons with barely any anaesthetics and with only the basic tools of trade, to the highs of animated and passionate games of football between different guerilla units.

Darcy's love life has been a failure with his Australian born Chinese wife having left him for an Aboriginal escaped convict some years earlier in the Northern Territory. Now a tall elegant lady by the name of Amna in their traveling party arouses the hints of romance in him. He is not confident to voice his feelings openly but does so under the influence of the local brew Sewa to his own embarrassment and to no avail. Amna has been badly tortured by the Ethiopians and is unable to reciprocate any such feelings.

Our party approaches closer and closer to Asmara as the book reaches its climax. We hear of the taking of 18,000 Ethiopian prisoners of war at the battle of Afabet, one of the biggest battles since the Second World War. We are also told of the rebel strike at the Ethiopian air base at Asmara in which more than 40 MiGs were destroyed along with 3 Antonovs. The huge scale of such a little known war is made evident as we go along with the disparate group of individuals seeking their own private goals in the dangerous journey. It is a fascinating tale teaching us a modern day history lesson. The main criticism of the book is the writing style, which makes for difficult reading. Often sentences need to be re-read to gain comprehension and this interrupts the flow of the story. However, the struggle is well rewarded by the quality of the drama and the intriguing mix of the characters.

Towards Asmara by Thomas Keneally was eventually disappointing. As a process, the experience was strewn with beauty, vivid images and arresting phrases. The author, for instance, described desert vegetation ready to burst into life at the first "rumour" of moisture. The writing style has a quirky inventiveness that regularly surprises. Where Towards Asmara eventually breaks down, however, is its inability to take the reader past the credibility hurdle that spans observer and participant.

Not that one particularly wants to participate! War, famine, being shot at, placed under house arrest or being tortured are all experiences to avoid on most working days and Towards Asmara is packed with them. The journalistic skill with which the book's events are described is enormous. We are introduced to enough history for context, enough current events to situate and enough political interests to begin an understanding.

So if the style is good and the context is engaging, where is the problem? The answer is in the book's characters. Darcy is an Australian, a bit mixed up after his ethnically Chinese wife ran off with an Aborigine jailbird back home. Now she won't even deal with him. There's Amna, an Eritrean guerrilla who has suffered every imaginable torture at the hands of the Dergue. There's Julia, a British lady of some class who is researching women's issues for the Anti-Slavery Society. There's Masihi, a film maker, and Christine from France who finds a role working with him.

And here is the problem. Towards Asmara claims the status of an African novel, but we never experience any aspect of the plot from within an African or local psyche. The place, its people and the events that unfold there are seen from without, via an external interpreter's filter. The immediacy of war, ambush, famine, conflict becomes lost in the second nature of the characters' experience. Also, the complications of the personal lives of these observers neither complement nor contrast with the exigencies of fighting for a cause. Eventually, everything seems unlikely, not least the very involvement of those involved with the events that unfold.

At one point, there was a suggestion that Darcy's ethnic minority wife back home in Australia might be offering an intellectual parallel with the Eritrean struggle. She, an apparent outsider, was allying herself and choosing to travel with an indigenous oppressed race, just like her estranged husband was doing with the Eritreans of Ethiopia. But that idea fizzled out, thankfully, because it could never have been sustained.

Towards Asmara is a thoroughly enjoyable read. At times the style and language are a complete joy. But, when it avoids polemic, it approaches caricature. The reader, like its foreign observer participants, is left out of the understanding and experience the book promised to deliver.