This review first appeared on the international e-zine Various Artists
Review: The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War by Sumia Sukkar (Eyewear
Publishing, 2013)
With its relentless accumulations
of violence and random atrocity, it’s tempting to think that, from time to
time, Sumia Sukkar is pushing at the bounds of plausibility in this, her debut novel.
Even the briefest of surveys of the video footage which continues to emerge
from the conflict in Syria, however, suggests that the mutilations, torture,
street executions and other horrors described and/or alluded to in the
narrative are no exaggeration. As we are reminded throughout, in fact, the
tragedies endured by the main characters constitute only part of a much larger
story in which an entire country is being torn apart for reasons which, to
many, remain chillingly unclear.
The central narrative of The Boy from Aleppo…, then, revolves
around and is, for the most part, narrated by the eponymous boy: a teenager
with Asperger’s called Adam who lives in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo
with his father, his three brothers and his sister Yasmine. The family is
recovering from the loss of Adam’s mother – who has died in circumstances which
are only hinted at – as the conflict on the streets around them begins to
escalate. What has been passing for ‘normality’ begins to disintegrate: power
cuts, food shortages, water shortages parallel the rapid escalation in tension
as it becomes evident that Adam’s siblings are themselves becoming embroiled in
the conflict. Abrupt crisis follows abrupt crisis until even the tiniest glimmer
of hope seems to have been extinguished – or in Yasmine’s words as reported by
Adam: “The city is in ruins, we are now stripped of everything and the only
things surrounding us are Pillars of Faith.” From this nadir point, the
narrative evolves through a series of carefully sequenced episodes and
encounters to reach a resolution which is as humane as it is unexpected.
Perhaps the greatest strength of The Boy of Aleppo…., however, is the sustained
and engaging narratorial voice. Able to ‘see’ emotions as colours and interpret
the world and those who inhabit it through a spectrum of moods and atmospheres,
Adam has an old-beyond-his-years logic which often comes to sound like wisdom
as he does battle with the routine-shattering events around him, attempting to
make sense of not only those events, but also the sometimes – to him – unpredictable
reactions of his family and neighbours.
The activity of painting and a cat
called Liquorice are his solaces – even though the cat comes to cause him
moments of anxiety and his own paintings depict scenes from the war with the
same unflinching quality as Sukkar’s prose – and his momentary, fragile
memories of happier times offer a poignant counterpoint to the grotesque
discoveries he makes as he comes of age in an age when, as Yeats had it, ‘all
changed, changed utterly’.
Telling the story of a peculiarly
vicious and cruel conflict from Adam’s perspective also has the advantage of
allowing Sukkar to bring the war in and out of focus (at least while Adam still
has space in his mind for other things), which means that the graphic images of
human damage are surrounded by an implicit ‘darkness’ in which who knows what
else might be happening to other people. Indeed, it is only when the focus
sharpens – in those few chapters voiced by Adam’s sister Yasmine – that the novel
loses some of its repressed energy: in these passages, it’s almost as if Sukkar
herself is losing confidence in the ability of her principal narrator to bear
the weight of the story when, in fact, Adam’s voice has already proved more
than adequate to the task.
This, though, is a very minor
qualm about a novel which delivers a portrait of life during wartime which is
both deeply discomforting and deeply compassionate. That the conflict which
constitutes its setting is still going on obviously gives the novel a
particular topicality – but the significance of this book extends far beyond
mere newsworthiness. (Tom Phillips)
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