First thoughts on The Monkey House

So I'm a little over halfway through John Fullerton's The Monkey House. The book was a little slow in the beginning although I can't say why. It certainly should have been exciting with Detective Rosso flying from Zagreb into Sarajevo and the plane having to bank sharply to avoid Serb artillery. Maybe I just have so much I want to read I'm distracted.

What I don't like is the book is not precise about the time period. It's just Sarajevo during the war. It appears to be wintertime. It's a pet-peeve that I think was fanned into a fire by Dennis that I have to know when exactly a book is taking place (assuming it's not just a novel that is presumed to be contemporary.)

Fullerton says that Rosso flew in from Zagreb which is the capital of Croatia. He also says Zagreb is safe. So I am guessing this is in 1995 as the Croatian War was from 1991-August 1995. As late as May of 1995, the Serbs were firing rockets into Zagreb. I dunno, this conflict, or really a series of them,  is so frakking complicated its reminiscent of the Middle East. All anyone can agree on is that no one particularly likes the Bosnians as they are a Muslim majority and, hence, apostates.

The war spilled over into Bosnia (as Rosso's wife and others predicted it would) soon enough in April 1992 and lasted until December 1995. It and the war in Croatia ended officially with the Dayton Agreement. Hard to imagine this crazy multi-national conflict being resolved in little Dayton, Oh. Poor Bosnia was unprepared for war. In 1991, Croatia and Serbia were attempting to partition it between each other.

Anyways, enough about the history. Clearly I need to read some books about this. I'm ashamed to say I was aware of all of this going on in the early 90's but I didn't pay much attention.

My interest in the book has grown as I've kept reading and slowly fallen into the rhythm of life in Sarajevo. Everyone is slowly starving. Rosso's wife is an alcoholic who sold most of their belongings for booze. The mental hospitals can no longer tackle problems like alkies as they have to keep the schizos and manics from walking into firefights. His goddaughter Tanja is having an affair with the local crime lord, Luka. She is a paramedic and saves a woman who was shot in the street by a sniper when no one else would help. She also resents to woman for getting shot.

What is most interesting is the moral/pragmatic counterweights of Rosso and Luka. Rosso hates that he is involved with Tanja but his interest in Luka for now is his involvement in a particularly nasty murder of a Serbian dentist who was also a police informant (Fullerton is playing that novelistic game of not handing out all the facts that the protagonist knows to sustain the mystery. That normally annoys me as it seems like cheating but he throws in so much other detail that you almost don't notice.) She was beaten and possibly stabbed and then choked to death in her own bathtub where she was left face down in a puddle of bloody shit. Yes, nasty. A nearly blind little girl was in the apartment scavenging, hid and tells Rosso she recognized Luka's voice.

So, he's a bad man. But why is Rosso even still trying to do his job at this point which has that deck chair on the Titanic feel? The government is practically non-existent. There isn't enough food. Rape and murder by the Serbs are commonplace. Plus, as Luka points out, his smuggling of booze and cigarettes which he trades for weapons are what is keeping the Serbs out of the city. The people love Luka. And it makes sense. Who would you side with in such a situation?

Fullerton (he's a British journalist, btw) has some lovely descriptive passages. I always appreciate effortless yet lovely prose. Here he describes the amorphous front:

Trenches and foxholes ran along a line of apple trees, zigzagging across the far side of the orchard. The trees themselves were mostly bare, the branches grey, the trunks slick and black, their roots emerging from the ground that was soft, wet and uneven...Rosso heard sporadic firing; the double crack of a single Kalashnikov, the vicious thump of an RPG, the fast ripple of a light machine-gun in quick short bursts like the sound of tearing cloth, only louder, more abrupt. Brrp. Brrp. .. Torn trees, churned soil, boots sucking in the mud. The drip, drip of snowmelt. Splashes of weak, watery sunshine. So this is the battlefield, Rosso thought. This is what it is like, for us and them. 

...The ground  was uninviting. It was too wet to hug with any enthusiasm and too flat do to much good if he did; the worst of both worlds. I don't mind getting wet if I'm still alive afterwards. It was bocage country; short murderous rushes, infantry charging in terror against other infantry lying in wait, waiting in terror. ..You could hear a man breathing behind the one just ahead, lying in his scrape, friend or foe, wondering too, index curling around the trigger, waiting for you to cough or sneeze...No front, no rear. Just murder. 

How can you not read that and picture everything now? The mundane winter landscape. Barren trees, snowy muddy ground that can suck your boots right off, the drip of melting ice. Interspersed with vivid and varied gunfire and musing about the flat ground that provides no cover from it. I won't be able to decide how much I like the book overall until I finish but this passage? Amazing.

Ok, what the hell is bocage you are asking? Unless you are British because then you probably already know. It is Norman in origin and referred originally to a landscape of mixed woodland and pasture. During WWII, British soldiers referred to the countryside of Normandy this way and the gently rolling hills and hedgerows that made visibility difficult and gaining territory on the Germans notoriously difficult.