Valley of the Peacock Angel. Martin Malone. A novel of ordinary people in modern war.
In
Valley of the Peacock Angel, Kildare author Martin alone has written a small masterpiece,
writes Brian Byrne. Small because it isn't a very long book. Small because it is essentially about maybe a half-dozen people. But paradoxically it is very large indeed because those same characters make real a tragedy so fearsome and so complex that most of us just let it wash over our lives as a news story too far away to affect us.
Yet, of course, nowhere is too far away for human tragedy to affect us in some way. Perhaps the niggle at our conscience because we have it so much better than those affected by the likes of chemical weapon attacks. Or the increasingly intrusive security systems deemed necessary to protect our fragile 'democracy' from those who may well have gotten reason to hate us. They're all part of the 'big picture' of life on our equally fragile spinning blue globe.
Big pictures by their very nature can be hard to interpret. No more so than at that nexus of the beginnings of so many of our civilisations, around the Middle East, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. An area seemingly forever torn by war, invasion, dictatorship and politics of the known world over the thousands of years that people have lived there. It is an area these days very well known to a couple of generations of Irish soldiers, serving as UN peacekeepers in what so often seems to be a 'fight for peace' in a place and among people who simply don't want it.
It is a place where Martin Malone most probably feels at home as much or even more so than in his native Kildare. In relative terms he spent only a small fraction of his life there, but his tours as a soldier seem to have made a deep impression. Much of the work he has produced as a writer is related to Lebanon and its surrounding areas, and always he writes with a deep compassion and empathy for the region and its people. In
Valley of the Peacock Angel his story is in northern Iraq, during the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and also much more recently, for it is a story of two stories.
We have all come to know Iraq as filtered through the 24/7/365 news cycles on whichever TV channels we watch. What we don't get in all of it is the individual, his or her personal tragedies and triumphs. And this is where Martin Malone tries to focus our attention. He does so through the people, and the effects on them of a chemical weapons attack, in the town of Halabja in 1988. Unlike Srebrenica and 9/11, it is one of the forgotten massacres.
He has admitted to it being one of his most challenging efforts so far. He tried for years to write it from the perspective of an Irish character, finally realised that it wasn't an Irishman's story. It is the story of a Kurdish goatherd and his family, and of an Iraqi soldier and his conscience in a place and time when no such thing was permitted. And later, of a German TV producer with a ghost from the Holocaust sitting on his shoulder. Malone knits together masterfully how they are all connected over decades and circumstances.
The Peacock Angel in the title is a local reference to Lucifer, believed in a religion of the area to have been given dominion over the benighted land. For those who live there, it's a love-hate relationship with their dark spiritual ethos, much as it is with those who lead them in their warring nations.
In the narratives around the author's characters there is potential for a book the size of
Exodus. But he resisted the temptation, if he was ever tempted. Malone works his novel like a good artist, painting in enough background that we know what is happening, then detailing the effects through the personal experiences and thoughts of those the story is directly about.
The writer has developed a deft touch with words. There aren't too many, there's no floweriness. But there are enough. More important, perhaps, is the sense that he is intimate with his characters. He knows their strengths, and their weaknesses, maybe even better than he knows his own.
This is not a pleasant book. Its theme, if not despair, is always close to it. It seems the Peacock Angel allows his people constantly to almost reach the edge of hope before they are once again yanked back towards the abyss.
There is a global moral compass here too. As a soldier, Martin Malone was in the fortunate position of being a peacekeeper rather than warmaker. In this book, he makes a plea for all of us to look at the effects of war on the receiving end, especially on those listed cruelly under the epithet 'collateral damage'. If we can see the individual, then as individual we can become angry about chemical weapons, biological warfare, and the whole idea of war itself.
As he said at his
hometown launch of the book, 'we're a small country, but we have a voice'. Indeed, we have. Millions of voices. If every adult in Ireland, young and old, read
Valley of the Peacock Angel, they would probably help make Martin Malone rich. He'd be much happier though, that we would all get angry, shout our anger loud around the world and gather millions of echoes, and by so doing, eventually impoverish the warlords.
A
tour de force is a somewhat hackneyed compliment. But
Valley of the Peacock Angel is one nevertheless.
