Review: In ‘More,’ Dispatches From Hell by a Human Trafficker
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Version 0 of 1. This disturbing new novel by Hakan Gunday, one of Turkey’s leading young writers, is like a visit to a Hieronymus Bosch hell: terrifying scenes of suffering, starvation, sadism, depravity and the agonies associated with combat zones. “More” recounts the story of a boy named Gaza who works with his father, a human trafficker, and it conveys the suffering of refugees and migrants as they try to make their way from war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Syria through Turkey and eventually on to Greece and the wider world (that is, if they survive a cascade of perils, one more awful than the next). It is also the narrator’s coming-of-age story, starting at 9 — a dark fable that traces the metamorphosis of a bright schoolboy into an appalling monster. The importance of this novel — which won the French Prix Médicis Étranger award — lies in its horrific portrayals of refugees fleeing desperate situations, sometimes leaving home with a lifetime’s possessions in a single plastic bag, only to find themselves in another inferno, preyed upon by unscrupulous smugglers and thugs. Such passages powerfully convey the plight of a record number of refugees today — the United Nations estimates that 65.3 million people were displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution at the end of 2015 — with the visceral, emotional detail that reports from policy groups rarely possess. The cynical narrator of “More” mocks the hopes and dreams of the refugees he and his father are transporting and extorting: “We carried to paradise those who’d escaped from hell. I believed in neither. But those people believed in everything. From birth, practically! After all, they assumed: If there is famine-afflicted, war-wracked hell on earth, there must surely be a heaven as well. But they were wrong. They’d all been played for fools. The existence of hell wasn’t necessarily proof of heaven.” Instead, these poor souls are locked by Gaza and his father in a wretched “hell pit large enough for 200 people to fit in, provided they sucked in their bellies and stayed close to one another” — while they await transport to the next stop, a wait that could be for two days, or seven, 14 or more. There is precious little food and water, and the stink of sweat and urine and excrement is suffocating. Fights and gladiatorial contests break out among these desperate people, with Gaza maliciously fomenting rivalries and hatreds, which he observes with clinical, almost sociological detachment. The sawdust on the pit’s floor becomes a symbol of all the wretchedness and violence Gaza and his father inflict on their human cargo, and casually shrug off. “The whole world should be covered in sawdust!” Gaza thinks. “That would make it easier to sweep up entrails spilled by knife, sword, or lead, or the blood from the rape of girls by baton, prick, or fist, everywhere in the world. Because sawdust was magic! It absorbed everything and was cleared away with the sweep of a mop.” Mr. Gunday (pronounced GUNE-die) suggests that Gaza’s cruelty is rooted in the abuse he suffered as a boy and the horror he witnessed almost daily, as his father’s helper. Gaza was raped at the age of 10, grew up with his killer father as a role model, and accidentally killed a man himself — a refugee named Cuma — by forgetting to turn on the air-conditioning in a transport truck. Cuma had been one of the few people to show Gaza any kindness by drawing a picture on a piece of paper, then folding the paper, origami-style, into a toy frog. Cuma remains a voice inside Gaza’s head. But the more suffering Gaza witnesses and inflicts, the more depraved he becomes. He extorts sex from a young refugee girl, bullies a man into promising him a kidney when he can’t produce cash, and has sex with a corpse. These passages sometimes devolve into labored imitations of Céline — so willfully perverse and repetitious that they gradually lose their shock value, becoming gratuitously stomach-turning. What incentive is there to read all these repellent passages about a heartless ogre? It’s when Mr. Gunday pulls back a bit and shows how a bright child could evolve into such a nihilistic beast that the novel becomes a more complex, Dostoyevsky-like inquiry into man’s capacity for evil. Most people in Mr. Gunday’s dark world, reeling from a pandemic of hate, are driven by primitive Darwinian survival instincts. Only refugees like Cuma — some of those whose lives are most at risk — seem capable of empathy and still hold in their hearts hopes for a better life. |