Review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

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A novel about Chechnya and its two wars in the 1990s and 2000s, Anthony Marra’s debut is original, insightful, occasionally horrific – and sometimes very funny. Neil Stewart reviews A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

In the opening chapter of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra introduces us to three main characters: Havaa, the young daughter of a man abducted by the Russian forces (“the Feds”) waging their second war on the breakaway republic of Chechnya; Akhmed, the rather inept would-be doctor who rescues her; and Sonja, an embattled surgeon, and one of the last two members of staff at the local hospital where Akhmed takes Havaa for safekeeping. The year is 2004, but it won’t be for long: as the novel’s perspective broadens out, the neat device of the decade-long “timeline” which opens each chapter – the year of its setting in bold, to help you keep track of who is doing what and where during the ten years that separate the two Chechnyan wars – comes into its own. Split-second decisions in the present day are shown to stem from long-established motivations, or to cast long shadows – although, in a long book with a confidently complex structure, one might still get a little lost among the different generations. (I was surprised that Akhmed, smoothly lying about graduating in the top ten percent of his Medicine class, turned out to be 39 years old and not, as I’d assumed, half that and talking about a more recent graduation.)

In addition, there are intricate links between the seemingly unconnected characters. We will come to see how Sonja’s missing sister Natasha has been instrumental in Havaa’s early life, and the reason Akhmed idolises Sonja despite never having met her before. This interlinking of stories in unexpected ways lends the setting – a single village – a certain claustrophobia; you too feel under siege. It also allows Marra to turn characters who start out as archetypes (the informer, the embattled historian) into fully rounded people. For me, in fact, the two standout characters are those who remain the most familiar “types”. Sonja is the archetype of the battle-weary doctor who can’t admit the time has come to abandon her work in the ruined hospital; her beautiful sister Natasha, whose fate Sonja will learn in the course of this book, travels a painfully familiar path that involves being hooked on heroin, sold into prostitution and sent overseas where she will be not Natasha, but a Natasha: “that’s what every girl from Eastern Europe is called,” another girl tells her, when she’s surprised her clients know her name; “we’re all Natashas to them.”

Characters chant the words to the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” – “You can tell by the way I walk that I’m a woman’s man” – as they stagger through the ruined hospital

All of life is here: indeed, the novel’s slightly clunky title derives from a definition of life found in a medical dictionary, one of several texts consulted by the various characters at different junctures. It may be too pointed a declaration of the literary ambitions of this novel that texts themselves – a dictionary, a constantly reworked history of Chechnya – should be the mechanisms by which its characters are drawn together; likewise, a series of portraits of 41 “disappeared” Chechnyans Akhmed makes, and which will become important as Sonja tries to trace the whereabouts of her missing sister, is one of two art projects which land in the book with This is an Important Symbol all but typed out on the page. (“Everyone here is a fucking artist,” Sonja remarks.) In the endnotes, Marra credits inspiration for this to two highly-regarded novels in which similar projects appear, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio; meanwhile, elements of Natasha’s horrific story are drawn from some non-fiction accounts of Eastern European girls sold to brothels. The effect in this laudably candid listing of sources is somewhat to detract from his own powers of invention, as though the book’s most significant moments are synthesised from existing sources rather than dreamed up by the author.

It’s quite something to risk leavening a story of such dark times with humour, even whimsy, but Marra manages it adroitly. Characters chant the words to the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” – “You can tell by the way I walk that I’m a woman’s man” – as they stagger through the ruined hospital, in scenes which could be bathetic in lesser hands. This is a very human story, the work of a writer supremely confident in his material; rarely do you have such a strong sense of being encouraged to trust the author as he recounts his tale.

This is not to say that the book shirks away from bloodshed, brutality and darkness. There are wince-inducing scenes of torture (given which, the importance, in another strand, of a novelty nutcracker looks like the blackest of jokes), and the well-trodden path Natasha is drawn down is no less shocking for its familiarity. As Akhmed learns of the Feds’ strategy to deter rebel recruitment by hunting down and destroying rebels’ families – “They will kill Havaa and call it peace” – he is shocked by how unshocked the revelation leaves him. “This incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.” A novel that sets out to chart, in unflinching detail, the disintegration of a country in conflict – or several conflicts – and the damage wrought on its denizens risks deterring readers who want their historical accounts made safe or sentimental (or who refuse to countenance the possibility there should be any laughter in all that dark). They shouldn’t be put off; though Marra has sometimes allowed his research to trump his imagination here, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena expands from its ultra-local, decade-long focus to encompass the whole world. C