|
|
|
The spy who is stuck out in the cold
 |
By Carol Campbell
For the Sunday Gazette-Mail
In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire in 1908, Basil Pascali patiently continues to write his regular reports to Abdul Hamid II, the “Shadow of God on Earth.” He serves as a Turkish spy on a small island that was once a Greek colony, perhaps in the days before Alexander the Great.
Pascali has been writing these reports for 20 years, almost the entire period of the reign of Abdul Hamid II. However, he has never gotten any response to his efforts even though he is paid regularly each month through a local bank.
What we read in the novel are the latest of Pascali’s reports. We are given the picture of the people and events on the island through his eyes, but we are warned very early that he is an unreliable reporter.
In the very first report, Pascali describes his relationship to the “Lord of the World” as like that of an unfortunate fly who has become entangled in the hair on his arm as he writes. Before the report ends, however, Pascali confesses that there was no fly — he invented it to make his point.
This seems to be one of the themes of the novel — that truth is not a static, pre-existing thing, but rather a matter of construction in the same way a novelist constructs his fiction.
Pascali says, “I have not attempted to disguise from your Excellency that my reports have not been entirely factual. But my effects are patiently and lovingly contrived — not imposed. To talk about truth as something that can be marched up to and arrested seems solemnly mad to me.”
Unsworth |
He comes to this conclusion after a discussion between Lydia, the island’s resident painter, and Anthony Bowles, the recently arrived British archaeologist who is the subject of Pascali’s extended series of reports.
Lydia has told Bowles that she paints the reality of the scene on the island, but Pascali knows that once it is put on canvas in rigid outlines, she has lost the fluctuating, unclear light of mystery that pervades the island.
Pascali hates to disagree with Lydia because he has been in love with her for years. He does not pursue any relationship with her because he knows his limitations. And he knows that he is viewed on the island as a figure of benign ridicule.
He has little money; his clothes don’t fit; he is always saying the wrong things. But he knows what others don’t know: He has a sacred mission to keep the Empire informed of anything suspicious in this remote corner of its domain.
And Pascali is suspicious of Bowles and his desire to lease property from the governor of the island, Mahmoud Pasha. Bowles wants to dig there for artifacts, and wants his presence to be legitimatized by an official lease. Pascali agrees to serve as translator in those dealings.
Pascali is also suspicious of an American, Smith, who is a self-proclaimed sponge fisherman. He thinks Smith’s story is a cover for gun smuggling.
By the end of the story, the fates of all these people are intertwined in both beauty and tragedy. And there is a clear sense in which Unsworth means the reader to believe in the inevitability of it all, the fateful merging of these individual lives.
Bowles finds a remarkable statue of a young man that symbolizes the Empire itself. The figure is trapped in the clay, trying to stride forward but with a backward aspect.
The period in which Pascali writes is that of the Young Turks who forced Abdul Hamid II to reconstitute Parliament. This first step of reform of the Empire eventually led to its dissolution in 1918 after World War I.
Pascali, however, knows nothing of the Young Turks or the state of the Empire. He operates in the darkness of silence and neglect; just as he moves on the margins of the society on the island.
On the Web site www.comtemporarywriters.com, Sean O’Brien has written: “For Unsworth’s fiction, the past figures as something far more considerable than the product of careful research and costumed elsewheres: the pleasures of imagination disclose an intensity where pleasure draws close to pain. In dealing with historical characters he is strongly drawn to marginality and failure.”
The Booklist review of “Pascali’s Island” calls it a “finely wrought tale — on the rim of the spy genre.” The content of the novel mirrors its relation to its genre.
Pascali lives on the margin, not only of the Empire, but of his own cultural milieu. In some ways, he lives on the rim of his own life and thoughts.
He invents himself and others, making all of them concrete by fashioning less-than-factual reports that no one ever reads. One hopes that this is not Unsworth’s metaphor for human life in general.
Carol Campbell leads book discussions for the Sunday Gazette-Mail’s Monday Book Club and for the Kanawha Public Library.
|
