Ismail Kadare’s The Siege can read like a present-day morality tale: embattled America fighting the war on terror, or paranoid America storming the borders of weaker nations. With its vivid plot and cast of generals, lobbyists and sycophants, you expect Cheney, Bernie Madoff or bin Laden to show up at any moment. Not bad for a book written in 1970.
Until he left his native Albania in 1990, Kadare was one of the country’s more prominent writers, supported by the state and living a comfortable life. His defence, then and now, was that he used allegories of the past to hide otherwise subversive tales. He also wrote communist propaganda, but hey, who are we to criticize.
The Siege opens in a 15th century fortress in Albania. Its inhabitants wait for the marauding army they know is just over the horizon. After a few weeks of preparation the bell sounds: dust kicked up by Ottoman horses can be seen in the distance.
Interestingly for an Albanian, Kadare tells the bulk of the story from the point of view of the Turks. Led by the Pasha and his loyal generals, the Turkish army is a multi-national patchwork of soldiers, cavalry, slaves, and battalions drawn from previously overrun countries. The variety of colours, cultures, religions and, in the case of the Pasha’s travelling harem, sexes, makes for a compelling parade of characters.
At the centre of the story is Mevla Çelebi, the official chronicler. He is there to witness the glories of battle and commit them to verse, but he has no stomach for war and is almost always at a loss for words. Scuttling through the camp in search of quotes and gossip, his main source is the Quartermaster General. The only person in the war council willing to commit to his opinions, most of what the Quartermaster General says makes Çelebi fear for his own head. The Quartermaster is almost always right and the chronicler almost always mortified by the truth.
While the Quartermaster, perhaps like Kadare himself, is loyal to the Pasha and never goes so far as to articulate dissent, it is he who questions the absolute power of their leader, who scoffs at the self-serving stupidity of the religious council members, and who sees through the propaganda that veils the “eternal recycling of defeat.”
The Siege is less an historical war novel than a deft parable of the relationship between idiocy and tragedy. In between the grand gestures of battle are the insignificant actions of small people: the frightened but curious harem girl, the drunken poet, the young janissary who has never known anything but war, the engineer whose famed cannon keeps breaking, the ambitious astrologer thrust into the role of strategist. Translated for the first time into English, The Siege is an exuberant cautionary tale of the science, horrors and buffoonery of war. Kadare has shown, both in his personal life and in his fiction, that there are no clear battle lines. While the Albanians of The Siege manage to repel the Turks for the time being, history tells us that they eventually succumb. The Turks today are a shadow of their former selves. Whoever wins, loses. Whoever loses, writes. Whoever reads The Siege, wins.
Leila Marshy has been published in a number of literary journals such as Descant, Grain, Fireweed, as well as anthologies including Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press). She has laid siege to a few fortresses in her life and is like this with the moats.
