Chance is the name we put on our ignorance

(Originally posted on 11th August 2007)

This post's epigrammatic title is quoted from The Painter of Battles, the forthcoming English translation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Spanish bestseller. I finished it today in the early evening sunlight, reading for an hour or so with my legs slung across the arm of the chair, askew as if they were prosthetic limbs put aside (one's own physical comfort can be such a distraction when trying to become immersed), and the cat nestled beside me on a folder of gas bills.

It took me the majority of its 220-odd pages to develop much of an appreciation for it. Faulques lives hermit-like in a former lighthouse; he is working on a painting, wrapped around the interior of the building's dome like a Moebius strip, capturing every horror he saw through his viewfinder as a war photographer. One day a Croatian soldier, an image of whose nationalistic defiance won awards for Faulques and cemented his fame, appears and announces that he has spent the last ten years hunting him down. He intends, he declares, to kill him, his reason being that wide distribution of the image meant that his Serbian wife and child were brutally slaughtered.

The Croatian's desire for vengeance is brought about not through blind hatred but from a slow realisation of the complicity of the photographer in what he chooses to record and how - like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, I suppose - his presence might affect it.

The reason it took me time to warm to it was that my first point of reference was Schopenhauer's Telescope, a superbly Kafkaesque novel by Gerard Donovan which made the Booker longlist in 2003 (the year of Vernon God Little's absurd victory). The jacket blurb for this reads:

One afternoon - in a certain European village, in the middle of a civil war - one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk.

Aside from being the most beguilingly phrased blurb I've ever read, I think the thematic similarity with The Painter of Battles is fairly obvious.

So, at first, this book suffered by comparison. The present-day narrative is constantly interrupted - or so I thought - by Faulques' reminiscences about Olvido, another photographer who teamed up with him and whose bloodied body constituted the last war photo he took. They became, of course, lovers and she is strikingly beautiful, piercingly intelligent and ineluctably drawn to Faulques, whose tactiturn machismo is softened by his intuitive artistic sensibility... and so on, just as middle-aged male novelists have acted out their fantasies so many times before.

But putting Olvido's stereotypical nature aside (and also the fact that I couldn't help thinking that her name sounds like a type of low-fat spread), the device gradually revealed its purpose. The Croatian has spent ten years in pursuit of Faulques, but he does not wish simply to assassinate him; indeed, he comes and goes from the lighthouse for several days. It is his intention that Faulques should come to understand why the chain of events which began with Faulques' taking of the photo must end with his death. As the two discuss the mural, and the paintings which seem to have inspired it, Faulques begins to understand that the painting is his own attempted expiation, his synthesis in paint what the Croatian's words also indicate.

Pérez-Reverte does flirt with the quantum implications of the book's philosophy. The Croatian refers to the 'butterfly effect', that illustration of chaos theory which demonstrates the manifold, seemingly unimaginable consequences of every action. But his lesson to Faulques is not that. It is, succintly, what I have headed this piece with, a notion which Faulques haltingly derives from the situation, the idea that no consequence is so unimaginable that we cannnot conceive of it and therefore that we cannot take responsibility for it.

On a distinctly lighter note... Photos of Dinosaurs goes international! I have my first overseas contribution, so I bring you, courtesy of my uneasy grasp of the French language, the following from a bookshop in Paris:

Do you have Stendahl's The Red and the Black?
- Yes.
Is it cheaper if I buy just The Red?