Wars, Revolutions and Genocide

It isn’t any wonder that I’ve been feeling so blue of late. Somehow, chance appears to be putting in my path, an alarming number of novels that have as their background, massacres and human cruelty on a grand scale. As I think I’ve mentioned before on the blog, I am an absolute Philistine in my reading habits. I read voraciously, but its primarily for entertainment; for fun. If I chance to pick up some interesting information on the way, I consider that a bonus.

I’d like to single out two of my fairly recent reads for their capacity to inform, to mesmerize, to nauseate and yes, also to entertain.

Last month, I read “Tokyo”, a novel by Mo Hayder, which revolves around Grey Hutchins, an emotionally damaged young female student who is strangely fixated on the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the Rape of Nanking in 1937. [It is said that 300 000 civilians were butchered in approximately 6 weeks]. Grey travels to Tokyo to verify the existence of film footage that was supposedly shot during the worst of the massacre. The book takes us on a physically and psychologically perilous journey to discover the veracity of this act of genocide and the truth about Grey herself. Flitting deftly between the past and the present, we are confronted with both collective and individual evils in the form of the massacre itself and within the shady world of organized crime in contemporary Japan.

This weekend, I finished Carla Banks’ “A Forest of Souls”. A murder/thriller set in the present day, the story has links to the past in the form of the Nazi invasion of Belorussia and the ensuing mass murders that took place in the Kurpaty area near Minsk during WWII. We are reminded by one of the pivotal characters that, in the beginning, the people welcomed the Nazis as liberators who would assist them to throw off Stalin’s harsh yoke. I need not go into the inevitable outcome of the Nazi invasion - some Jews found a way to escape and join the partisans in Russia, or managed to enlist in the Russian army - but suffice it to say that 800,000 Belorussian Jews were murdered.

The modern story revolves around the murder of Helen Kovacs, a female historian who has been researching the occupation of Belorussia by first the Russian and then the Nazi forces. Her best friend and colleague, Faith Lange, correctly concludes that the motive for Helen’s murder is linked to her research. Through her investigations, Faith discovers that her own immigrant grandfather has a secret that brings him into the murderous circle.

To be honest, I thought the primary plot rather weak, but it aptly provides a manner in which to expose the horrifying acts perpetrated during that period of history.

I would say that the former novel was probably more gripping in its storyline, its multi-dimensional characterization; and in the manner in which the plot unfolds, but both books highlight the dangers of extremism of any kind, and of course, humankind’s capacity for cruelty under the ‘right’ set of circumstances.

To go back to my opening lines, I sometimes wonder whether, like the maxim “we are what we eat”, we don’t absorb the tone of the books that we devour. I think its time to read some fluffy chicklit and lighten up a tad.