And The Cellist Played On (Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway)

Member Name: collingwood21

Product:	Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway
Date:	03/06/09 (355 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wonderfully well written, Engaging and absorbing, Makes the war vivid and real

Disadvantages: Based on real life people who were not consulted

About a year ago, I read an intriguing article in The Times about a man called Vedran Smailovic. A professional musician when the Bosnian war began in 1992, he was one of thousands of ordinary people who became trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. Nobody might ever have heard of Vedran outside of his home city, however, if it were not for his remarkable act of protest, where he defied the snipers firing into the city on a daily basis to play his cello for 22 successive days at the scene of a shelling that had killed 22 people queuing to buy bread. Dressed in evening tails, photographs of this defiance became iconic images of the war and made artists from David Bowie to U2 to Pavarotti clamour to record music with him. But this fame was not welcome, and the cellist turned down all offers to instead retreat into quiet obscurity in Northern Ireland once the war ended - that was until Canadian author Steven Galloway wrote the best-selling "The Cellist of Sarajevo" in 2008, thrusting Smailovic once more into the unwelcome spotlight and drawing angry accusations of stolen identities and cashing in on another man's bravery from the cellist. This controversy has probably helped the novel become a bestseller every bit as much as the content has, and that content is powerful stuff, the sort of novel that is cat-nip to book clubs.

Set during the siege of Sarajevo, the novel introduces us first to the eponymous cellist, an unnamed man who once played in the city's symphony orchestra, but who now spends his days just surviving the war that rages around him. One day, this cellist witnesses a shell falling on a marketplace near his apartment; it kills 22 people who were queuing hopefully to buy bread, a rare commodity in a city that is slowing starving. Greatly grieved by this act, the cellist stands shocked by his window for 24 hours, then dresses in his evening suit and takes his cello out to the crater that is all that remains of yesterday's queue. Here, he plays Albinoni's Adagio, a piece whose score was symbolically rescued from the fires of Dresden and reconstructed to form a beautiful piece of music - the cellist then vows to play it once each day for each victim at the time the shell exploded*, and retires back inside to await his next performance.

The novel then takes us along three pathways through the city, experiencing briefly the lives of three civilians who are each in some way connected to the cellist. Firstly there is Arrow, a female sniper who has joined the ranks of those trying to protect the city from its besiegers. She is assigned by her unit commander to protect the cellist, a symbol of hope and defiance to the city's residents, as he plays each day. Then we meet Kenan, a man in his forties whose existence revolves around making a journey twice a week to fetch clean water for his family and elderly neighbour, the ungrateful Mrs Ristovski, from one of the city's last remaining sources. This is a journey that is fraught with danger - even more so on his return when the full canteens encumber him and make him a larger and slower target for snipers - but bringing his family along for help will just endanger them as well. As a member of the cellist's audience, Kenan finds a little hope and normality brought back to his life. Finally there is the elderly Dragan, who has to master his fear and maintain a semblance of civility as he crosses a city he no longer recognizes as his own to work in his now vital job as a baker; Dragan hears of the cellist but as much as he wishes to hear him play, prefers instead to concentrate on earning bread for his family and getting home again without being shot.

Although a remarkable story, it is written without any histrionics, in a pared-down style that feels more like you are reading a short story than a novel. The acts of Kenan and Dragan, those of ordinary men living in extraordinary times, were unexceptional in the context of the war but are courageous to our eyes. Galloway keeps the language describing their acts understated, while making clear to us just how dangerous their missions to keep others alive were - it takes writing of some considerable skill to achieve this. I quickly became absorbed and engaged as a reader, and it was the sort of novel where each time you put the book down you are desperate to pick it up again to know what happens next. But this novel doesn't just work as a piece of fiction. I found that this book exposed more of the fear, grief, hunger and human suffering in Sarajevo than any news report or documentary I have seen on the war; it makes you want to go out and find out more about what happened and why, to truly consider what it would be like if your nice, safe life disappeared into the black hole ofa civil war. Whatever your feelings on whether he should have used someone who is clearly Smailovic as a centrepiece or not, it works very well and the hand is not overplayed - Galloway uses him to weave his various plot threads together and to give a structure to a novel that would otherwise have been rambling, but does not make him the sole focus of the story. The ending is perhaps inevitable, but that doesn't detract from what is a very effective and moving book.

In an interview with a Canadian news channel, Galloway has said that, "I really wanted to write a book about what high-pressure, wartime situations do to ordinary people -- not professional soldiers, or generals or politicians". This is exactly what you get in "The Cellist of Sarajevo"; four perspectives on what it is like to live in the middle of a civil war, in a city under siege, where shells and snipers make the outside (and often also the inside) world a very dangerous place. Arrow, apparently based on a Danish radio interview with a female sniper during the Bosnian war, is the nearest the narrative gets to the perspective of a soldier. Although effective in her role, Arrow lacks the training and detachment of a professional soldier, and we feel the anger and the crisis of confidence that she tries to control as she goes about her work; she sees herself as different from the enemy snipers, as she shoots only soldiers while they kill unarmed civilians. She does not like killing and tries not to hate these men for who they are, but wants to defend her city from "the men on the hills" (the people in Galloway's book are never given identifying labels as they were in media coverage) and feels compelled to use her civilian target shooting skills in this way. There is much food for thought in the ethical issues that Arrow explores, and it provides a fascinating perspective on the situation that none of the other characters could have fully provided.

In the end, what is left is the Adagio - music rescued from the wasteland of a ruined city in much the way that Galloway has rescued the threads of his story out of another ruined city. In both cases, a thing of beauty has come out of despair and destruction. The controversy over using unacknowledged people from real life rumbles on, however. As with "Titanic", which also suffered controversy due to embellishing characters who had existed in reality, perhaps it was too soon to do the same here - although the embellishments in this novel were almost entirely positive, the fact the real people are still alive (certainly in the case of the cellist, I'm not sure if anyone has yet identified Arrow) and unconsulted leaves a somewhat sour air hanging over an otherwise outstanding book. Powerful and wonderfully well written, it is a novel that comes highly recommended from me, however much it shamelessly borrowed from Smailovic in its construction.



Publisher: Atlantic Books
Pages: 288 (paperback)
RRP: £7.99 (currently £3.76 on Amazon.co.uk)

* The real Smailovic didn't quite do this; "I am not stupid, I wasn't looking to get shot by snipers so I varied my routine" he has said.

Summary: The siege of Sarajevo brought to life in a remarkable novel