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Literary Review, by John Murray, September 1997
ALL THERE:
The key dramatic point in this rich, exuberant and poignant novel is the abduction by Syrian agents of a Greek, Christian doctor, Petros Angelopoulos, who is visiting old friends in - wait for it - East Lothian. Previously he had been working in harrowing conditions in a Palestinian camp in Beirut, zestfully enduring eighteen-hour days patching up all those mutilated by the Amal militia. Dr 'Angel' is an outstanding comic creation. Faithless to women but faithful to his patients; a cheerful pessimist, who whiles away his blindfolded incarceration with tender memories of passionate love affairs.
‘ An endless web, woven with everything that was, and possibly everything that will be. Each field with a built-in memory derived from self-resonance with its own past. Thus we first learn about 'morphic resonance' (there's nothing new under the sun), the structural framework of this comic, apocalyptic and brilliant political satire.
'Morphically resonant' with Angel's abduction is the parallel snatching from Fontevrault, France, of the crusading monarch, Richard the Lionheart, by Aziz Khamash, the Christian war-lord and 'Butcher of Beirut'. Richard has risen from his tomb, only to be whisked away to Beirut, to be grilled by Khamash's occultist parents about the apocalyptic future of the Druze.
What is really impressive is the way Louvish's knowledge of Lebanese politics, and the underpinning eschatologies of the warring sects, leads him and his characters Tewfik and Angel towards a compassionate, bird's-eye view of the whole sorry picture. The author grew up in Jerusalem and is a Scottish Jew who is obviously pro-Palestinian.
This is a very angry satire, but it also attempts to understand the fanatic occultism of the Druze and the hard-line Rabbis. Indeed, Louvish's panoptic sympathies are very similar to those of Simon Stylites, the pillar-dwelling anchorite who is also a key historical player in the book.
Equally impressive is the way the author manages to incorporate lengthy political discussions and large chunks of newspaper quotations into the fabric of the novel. These passages might have read like cut-price Aldous Huxley, were it not for Louvish's compassionate anger, excellent comic dialogue and razor-sharp one-liners. His versatility allows him to construct authentic monologues by characters as diverse as Saddam Hussein and the lovably sour Baruch Blok.
As well as political anger, Louvish expresses a profoundly spiritual anger. He is well versed in the genuine spiritual ideals of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which is why, like Simon Stylites, he has an overarching view of the Levantine tragedy.
As for technical versatility, Louvish manages the whole range, from black descriptions of Angel's gory craniotomies, to a decorously compressed comic prose when satirising American art colonies, London publishing, East Lothian, etc. On one page he has the sober, spiritual clarity of the proclamations of the new Mahdi; elsewhere, he does his satirical scenesetting with a skilfully truncated syntax reminiscent of J P Donleavy. For a writer with so much talent he ought to come across as a show-off, but his self-deprecation is all of a piece with the remarkable graphics that scatter the text: Simon Stylites's excrement-disposal machine and Israeli gas masks, to name but two.
In imaginative energy, erudition, political anger and ebullient comedy, Louvish seems to me to be nearly in the same league as Salman Rushdie. The one real flaw in this book is the lengthy subplot involving the author Danny Pick, ex-East Lothian mental patient, who plots to assassinate his London publisher, McTeague - the only truly heartless note in an otherwise outstandingly humane book. Nevertheless, this is a very important novel by an extremely gifted author. It's too good to win the Booker prize, but I'm sure Simon Louvish doesn't give a damn about that.
(A nice thought, Mr Murray, but, alas, we are all mortal… S.L.)
[The Scotsman, Ian Bell, 12 April 1997
At Chinon, Richard the Lionheart, bored with eternity, rises from his tomb and orders sandwich jambon and tomato salad. Sitting un a cafe among tourists - none of whom seem to notice the absence of his heart and entrails - he recalls and relives his Crusades, the sieges and slaughters, the angels screaming inside his head, the devastating vision of lost, sacred Jerusalem. Then he is accosted by a suave, mysterious gentleman from the Lebanon...
Elsewhere, at Drem in East Lothian, Daniel Hohenbhe, real name Pick, "failed scribe and mental patient,” resident of Andrew and Rhona Mackenzie's Convalescent Home for the Depressed", is dreaming of Nicolae Ceausescu, deposed Romanian dictator. Daniel has an editor to despise and perhaps to kill - this may be the ultimate therapy – and Avram Blok, hero of several other Louvish novels, close at hand. Meanwhile, the West prepares for its joust with Saddam Hussein while Dr Angelopoulos recalls, en passant, that “Eating God is an old practice".
And so on, helter skelter. The Days of Miracles and Wonders… all but defies precis, and is all the more exhilirating for that. It has high ambitions and high comedy. There is a serious point to be made within it about the West's dealings with the Middle East but the real delight of the book is the way in which the most unlikely elements are cajoled into a plot. Sometimes it runs out of control but even that seems somehow logical, most of the time. The prose, a series of interlocking monologues, is good, too.
Louvish, born in Glasgow and raised in Israel, is an exuberant writer. He embraces the unlikely, picks ideas and language from all points of the compass and all stages in history. The Days of Miracles and Wonders is constructed like a mad tapestry, linear yet far from straightforward. It is one of the things a novel can be when an author decides to abscond with historical perspective.
That said, you could object that the novel is almost too rich, too overwhelming, as though Louvish has been able to resist nothing within its vast scope. For all its comedy, this is a hugely ambitious book that sometimes seems too pleased with its own stratagems. Juxtaposing the Lionheart (he later finds a job as a pastry chef) with the Gulf war, and one mad, brutal "crusade" with another, is a superficially attractive device, for example, which does not quite work because it does not quite explain anything much.
The novel concludes with a chronology from the birth of Christ to the repression of the Kurds in 1991 as a Background to The Days of Miracles and Wonders. The intention seems to be to map the connections Louvish has been striving to make. But if the point has not been grasped, after 436 pages, if the torrent of prose has not made the links, why conclude with such a literal depiction of western interventions in the East?
Nevertheless, the novel proper vindicates itself. There is a self-belief in the writing, like an hallucination made plausible by conviction. This sort of historical fantasy is extremely difficult to pull off if only because of the many changes in register it necessarily demands. For the most part, Louvish succeeds triumphantly.
Most novels are not animated by ideas, whatever their authors like to imagine. Here the prose is more than just descriptive or informative. Rather it is a mirror of the 'in a ' ed experience, history as it is lived.
This book is deserving high praise. When fantasy makes absolute sense, when the irrational provides convincing evidence for reason, a novelist can claim to have earned the name. Louvish is at the height of his considerable powers.
[The List, Edinburgh, April 1997
Miracle worker
It's a brave man who tackles the chaotic history of the Middle East in fiction, but SIMON LOUVISH has a personal perspective that bridges international borders.
By Teddy Jamieson
Born in Glasgow, raised in Jerusalem and now resident in London, writer and filmmaker Simon Louvish considers himself something of a 'complete mongrel' identity-wise. With an accent redolent of his Israeli upbringing, yet garnished by a burr which suggests the influence of his Scottish wife, Louvish could reasonably be described as the living embodiment of the word 'cosmopolitan'. Perhaps that explains why lie proves so successful in adopting a wide range of different voices - Greek, Scottish, Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, even Sandworm, among others - in his latest novel. The Days Of Miracles And Wonders.
Neatly summed up on the cover blurb as 'an epic of the New World Disorder', it is no less than a millennial history of the Middle East, culminating in the Gulf War. Sprawling across 427 pages, it still seems breathless at times as it jumps between East Lothian, Charoux, Iraq and Israel, and from the ancient past to recent history in an attempt to explain the chaotic nature of the region.
Along the way, Louvish resurrects Richard The Lionheart, conducts a philosophical discussion on the ethics of explosions between two 'smart' bombs and explores the various horrors of siege conditions, captivity and total war. Oh, and did I mention it was a comedy? It is, even though it's very much laughter in the dark.
As a novel of ideas, it is hydra-headed, but one of the most resonant ones is the way the past retains a grip on the present. 'These are places ruled by history,' Louvish says of Israel and her Arab neighbours. 'and it's particularly true of Islamic fundamentalism, with its obsession with the seventh century, which to them is the only time when anything proper was happening.'
Of course, Islamic critics can be rather fiercer than anyone writing for the Sunday supplements. Louvish suspects that's why he spent five years looking for a publisher before Canongate stepped in. '1 think that in the wake of the Rushdie affair, people didn't want to touch something which dealt with the Middle East and its conflicts. Anything to do with an Islamic theme was immediately verboten.'
If that's the case, Canongate should be applauded for their bravery. The Days Of Miracles And Wonders has its longeurs, but you can't fault its ambition and adventurousness. Best of all, it celebrates all the best in humanity. It takes ordinary people - a priapic Greek doctor, a wheelchair-bound Israeli and a Palestinian exjournalist who's lost his family - and exposes their simple, everyday heroism.
The same day I speak to Louvish, a suicide bomber detonates a nail bomb in Tel Aviv, killing four people. The Middle East remains volatile and Louvish wouldn't be surprised if a Gulf War reprise was played out in the near future. Yet, like his characters, he retains a stubborn, hard-won optimism.
'Our individual lives are less controllable than the leaders, religions, creeds and ideologies presume. One of the hopeful signs of the modern world is that even though we've had an unbelievably totalitarian century, with immense wars and dictatorships, at the same time we've seen again and again these things collapse. At the end of the day, there hasn't been this kind of Orwellian totalitarian system which simply perpetuates itself and can't be broken. This has turned out to be a myth. Life is sort of messier and merrier than it seems, and all these things can be survived.'
[Scotland on Sunday, 20 April 1997:
Sacred and Profane on the Fulham Palace Road,
Interview by Brian Morton.
It is not as God hath writ; or at least it is not as writ in What's Up God?, Simon Louvish's last but-one novel. There, the newly faithful of the Piccadilly line are discovered "deep in uplift, devouring Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Selected Political Writings, or the Life and Miracles of Saint Francis of Assisi, or the Good Book itself, the Old and the New Testament, the Koran, Haddith, the Jewish Siddur or Saint Benedict's Rules for Monasteries."
Faith has been renewed by the announcement - confirmed on Newsnight where the archangel politely fronts up an ever more hesitant Jeremy Paxman - that the resurrection of the dead and the day of judgment are at hand, pencilled in for April 30 and May 7, 1999 respectively, and for an hour, 3am, usually favoured by the drugs squad and the anti-terrorist branch.
Two years early, to be sure, but even at 3 o'clock on a needlessly hot April afternoon it takes a bloatedly apocalyptic eye to detect much sign of a coming revelation on the line out to 'Emmersmif. Three people are reading The English Patient, and one -a nice touch -the Selected Tales of Herodotus as featured in The English Patient. Opposite, two compact Turks share a paper, Something-uriyet, gazing impassively at the lead shot of two equally impassive NCOs garotting what I guess is an army deserter, and even he looks untroubled by it all (are these things posed? surely garotting isn't painless). And everyone checks out the girl in the pawprint croptop, obviously on a Scary Spice kick, who doesn't have any in her spectacles. Spooky.
Debouch onto Fulham Palace Road, past the busker who's been doing the Webern arrangement of 'Streets of London' for 10 years and pass through the weird shadow of the Seagram's building (cue "Aye, and the architect was drunk, tae" lines). A great Lubjanka of a hospital on the left, Distillery Lane (London used to run on gin, before it started running on 4-star) on the right. Almost there.
Louvish inhabits a quiet sidestreet, socially somewhere between Men Behaving Badly and Terry and June, in an upper flat that resembles a small Marxist shrine (the Brothers, not Karl) and a temple to the spirit of W C Fields, whose biography Louvish has just written. Conversation is much as you'd expect in the context.
"What's Up God? was a book I wrote to amuse my agent. He was keen that I should write a line of books under a pseudonym. Basically, my editor had told me that he couldn't publish any book over 250 pages. The current book was a no-no, so we gave them What's Up God? instead."
The current book, Louvish's latest, Day s of Miracles and Wonders, Is published by Canongate on a contradeal with Somerville House in Canada. Ten books in, it cements an appropriately bizarre geo-ethnic cycle, one that's still evident in Louvish's engagingly composite accent.
"The funny thing is that I've now gone full circle and become a Scottish writer because I'm published by Canongate. But becoming a Scottish writer is a function of having become a Canadian writer. I suppose I have a kind of identity as a partial exile Scot. Like the Irish we've haemorrhaged a vast proportion of our population abroad In my schizoid personality there's a Scottish element, and a Jewish element, and an Israeli element."
In order to understand who Louvish is and what he does, it's worth drawing up a brief table of elements. Though these days, he's closer to Edinburgh and East Lothian - his wife's neck of the woods and the partial setting of Days of Miracles and Wonders - Louvish was born in Glasgow. He wasn't there long, but were any primal scenes deeply imprinted?
"I have a vague memory of an aeroplane. I was in a horizontal position. A grey sky. I remember a wall, and I have a vague memory of a pushbike. that's about it.
"My parents went to Israel in 1949. In fact they'd emigrated before, in 1937, but they returned to Glasgow in early August 1939, which meant that they got stuck there for the duration of the war. There was an arrangement in the run up to World War Two that the British had a quota of certificates for Jewish immigrants, and there was an agreement to give them up for German Jews who needed them more, so it was only after the war that my parents re-emigrated."
Louvish senior had been prominent in student Zionist politics in the 1930s but how was the realisation of the dream? Anything like that Scottish publishing shibboleth about living as if in the early days of a much younger country?
“One has to get over certain cliches about what Israel was like in the 1950s. The basic concerns were how to get there as soon as possible, how to get your leg over, and essentially how to survive in this rather strange provincial city.
"It was a frontier town. As a kid I used to go up to this great concrete wall with holes in it and you'd look through and see this mysterious world on the other side. If you talk about Jerusalem as part of a young country, you also have to look at it as a very, very old city, even the new part in which we were living was living on the basis of being this ancient place."
The strange opposition of old and new is the fuel of Louvish's fiction, particularly the trilogy of novels about Avram Blok, a Hungarian war baby who also turns up at the Retreat in Drem as a minor character in Days.
" He was an amalgam of myself and a couple of friends. He became a sort of Candide character on whom I hung all sorts of madness I wanted to talk about. The first book - The Therapy of Avram Blok - is about the lunatic asylum in Jerusalem in which he was incarcerated. That played with this idea that you can't tell the difference between the lunatics and the sane in the city. The second - City of Blok - was about Jerusalem between Camp David and the Lebanon War, and then in the third - The Last Trump of Avram Blok - he goes abroad and ends up as a lay therapist in East Lothian.
"It all had to do with that idea of living in a divided city and a city that essentially lives in the past and lives on myths. Tourists come looking for holiness when in fact the city is actually profoundly profane.
"I used an idea from an old Scottish journalist called Comyns Beaumont who wrote a book in the 1930s that suggested Edinburgh was the real Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives was the Castle Mount, Joppa and so on; all the Biblical events happening there.
"There was a second book which 'proved' that the Greeks also lived in Scotland and that Ben Nevis was Mount Olympus. All very convincingly researched and argued. So I had this mythology; a madman in Jerusalem who's striving to convince everyone that they're actually in Edinburgh, just to turn the whole thing around.
"People know about the Jerusalem Syndrome; they're convinced they've had a revelation and seen Christ. One of them, in fact, a young man called David Koresh, brought this to an apocalypse at Waco. And so these ideas go around the world, the idea of Jerusalem as a centrepiece. But if you actually grew up there you saw that as completely absurd and saw life in the city as a kind of facade, more akin to circus than anything else." That self-deluding artifice is at the heart of Louvish's fiction, as indeed is the notion that almost any historical `fact' can be counterfactually reinvented.
Absurd as any internecine conflict seems from the outside, absurdist as the imaginations it generates inevitably are, the dichotomies of post-British Jerusalem are very real. Koresh was no more than one of a kind, pumped up on sex and Star Trek.
"There were many apocalyptic people about: those mad Jewish monks who hang about eating nothing but nuts and honey; strange, long-haired characters from the ultra-religious Orthodox areas where the black hats hang out. Chasidic Jews who were in fact anti-Zionist because they thought the State of Israel was heretical.
"But what people find difficult to understand about the whole IsraeliPalestinian issue is that basically the country is the size of a postage stamp and an argument about a hill that seems mad to the people outside is actually very profound, because there's no space.
"The sleepy little town I knew has disappeared completely to be replaced by these housing estates and populated by people who're looking for the old city which has disappeared under the very buildings in which they're living."
Louvish wrote in Hebrew in his teens, a sprawl of idiosyncratic detective stories recently come to light (sic), and the cadences of Talmudic disputation and self-ironising aggrandisement are audible in just about every line. It was, though, film that took him out of the country. "The politics came later. Basically I left to go to what was then the London School of Film Technique, where I spent two years. I got involved in a seems of independent documentary films about South Africa, Greece and Israel. It all began with End of the Dialogue, a clandestine film shot in Soweto in 1969.
"I was very unpolitical in my teenage years and thinking about the politics of Israel came in a circle through South Africa, doing something which was completely alien to me, going with a camera to the townships in which for the first time I was looking at that kind of poverty, that kind of deprivation, that kind of oppression. When you were brought up to Israel, certainly during the 1950s and 60s, the awareness of the other side, of the Palestinians and Arabs is practically nonexistent. I suppose the change really started on Army service. I was an army cameraman, looking into the other side in 1967 when the West Bank was being occupied."
The "other side" always figures strongly. What's Up God? is a "romance of the apocalypse". The new book finds Richard the Lionheart climbing out of his tomb in Fontevraud, criss-crossing with a web of sub-plots that would confound the most devoted Talmudic scholar, and fetching up making baklava at a pastry shop in Beirut, an ironic career move for a Crusader whose heart and digestive system are housed elsewhere pickled in vinegar.
Back along the Fulham Palace Road, through the Levantine eclecticism of W6 fast food, and the familiar but easily forgotten Babel of voices. "In London, I'm just another foreigner. I carry this passport, but here I look at their concerns very much as an outsider. And it seems to me to be very, very, very strange and I'm obviously very strange to the English."
It's been a routine very much like that of his idol Fields, who once trod the boards round these villagey boroughs, working quietly on that barking image; and it makes a certain serendipitous sense that Fields should be on the Tube back into town, glowing with rosacea, muttering misanthropically at every stop, every embarkation and departure, and contentedly burping little vinous gales from under a nose that must have required planning permission.
Simon Louvish's The Days of Miracles and Wonders is published by Canongate Press. His biography of W C Fields, The Man on the Flying Trapeze is published in May by Faber.
[
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 19, 1997
Review by Suanne Kelman -
Really big novel takes it all on:
Critics sometimes complain that no one writes big novels anymore, novels that try to capture the full range of society. No one could level that reproach against Simon Louvish's The Days of Miracles and Wonders. It is, in every sense, a big book. It doesn't take on a single society; it tackles a half-dozen of them.
Understandably, it boasts a cast of thousands. The moral centre of the novel is unquestionably Dr. Petros Angelopoulos, the mad war surgeon of Beirut. The career of the Angel, as he's known, seems suspiciously close to the work of an actual Canadian physician, Chris Giannou. But the character - amorous, hard-drinking, fiercely driven - transcends and illuminates the familiar news reports.
The Angel works among a group of Palestinians trapped under heavy bombardment in a Lebanese refugee camp. They include an idiot savant and a journalist whose wife and children have been killed by a Christian warlord. The journalist, Tewfiq, hopes to write his own big novel, a contemporary Arabic version of Camus's The Plague. (That novel crops up several times, most chillingly in a cartoon in which three rats read it, giggling.) The besieged group also boasts an Israeli hostage, who acts as Angelopoulos's scrub nurse.
Up on the coast of Scotland, in a mental institution, we have the Israeli Avram Blok, the hero of several earlier Louvish novels, a one-time lunatic turned lay therapist. Blok's patients include Danny Hohenlohe, a failed writer obsessed with killing his publisher. Eventually Louvish will add Blok's family, several of Angelopoulos's lovers, the murderous Christian warlord, and his family, plus all the central players in the Gulf War - the politicians, the mercenaries, the Kurdish refugees and, of course, the journalists.
There is another class of character, yanking the novel sharply into postmodern territory. One of them, St. Simon the Stylite, has survived centuries of bloodshed in unswerving misanthropy. Richard the Lionheart, another historical relic, shows up in the novel's opening scene, resurrected by black magic. Richard lacks a heart and entrails, these having been scattered around France, but he still manages to have a pretty good time.
Louvish is clearly an intellectual as well as a novelist. Somehow he manages to insert into his text everything from Paul Simon (see the title) to Noel Coward, Gilgamesh, Stephen Hawking and Oliver Sacks. Characters hallucinate visits from Jean Genet. In isolation, they pray to be transferred to Sartre's populated hell. The writer also knows almost too much about medicine. The reader who pays close attention should finish the book with a pretty fair idea of how to perform, a laparotomy (an abdominal incision).
Believe it or not, much of this is extremely funny. Blok, for instance, has his own theory of the history of the Middle East: "Falafel is a proven toxin, its [sic] swimming with braineating bacteria!" Taken hostage, a chained and blind-folded Angelopoulos relives surgical procedures with hallucinatory additions: "A chopped pancreas beards me in a dead end and bends my ear with a whining recitation of the Geneva Convention on the Victims of War."
This combination of black humour, playful pedantry and sprawling structure is probably not for everyone. Personally, I found most of the book enthralling. Louvish's extended fantasy treatment of the Gulf War did become tiresome, though - reminiscent of Afro-American writer Ishmael Reed at his worst. Louvish even names two of his war correspondents William Shakespeare and Henry James.
At its best, however, The Days of Miracles and Wonders is a marvel. Its wit and inventiveness carry it a long way, but it has more solid gifts to sustain it. The book is guaranteed to offend ideologues of all persuasions: Its horror and pity are impartial. That in itself is a measure of the clarity and compassion Louvish brings to his obsession with the ongoing misery of the Middle East.
[]
The Jewish Chronicle, Arnold Brown, May 30, 1997:
One of the many memorable characters in this dark, disturbing book is an unsuccessful novelist, Daniel Hohenlohe, who plots to kill his publisher and has frequent hallucinations in which he converses with the dead dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife, Elena.
Hohenlohe is being treated in a sanatorium in East Lothian by ex-lunatic lay-therapist, Avram Blok, the hero of three previous Simon Louvish novels.
For a less ambitious writer, this Grand Guignol alone would have been a highly entertaining blacker-than-black comedy, but, Louvish being Louvish, the author also sets out to try and make sense of the eternal strife that is the Middle East.
The Holy Wars and Crusades and their continuum until the present day provide an explosive backdrop to the novel. The story opens with Richard the Lionheart - he of the T'hird Crusade - rising from his tomb in the Abbey of Fontevraud.
He is sans heart, guts and other vital organs, but nonchalantly mingles with the tourists at a smart caft, where he studiously reads Le Monde, presumably anxious to catch up with events. Oh yes, and he later ends up as a pastry chef in a Beirut nightclub.
And, as Louvish is clearly a proponent of the Make Love, Not War school, it is no surprise that Richard also manages to do his share of the former along the way. As does the good Doctor Petros Angelopoulos, the priapic war surgeon from the Beirut refugee camps, who arrives at the East Lothian sanatorium only to be kidnapped in mysterious circumstances.
The action jumps dramatically between Charoux, Iraq, Israel, New York, East Lothian and London, encompassing the ancient and modern sufferings of Jew and Arab and culminating in the horrors of the Gulf War with its "smart" bombs and questionable TV voyeurism.
If all this seems somewhat fragmented and bizarre, be assured that, as this extraordinary novel unfolds, the author's themes emerge with great clarity and passion.
It is obvious that he believes both Jews and Arabs have a common legacy of conflict and tragedy: one race ravaged by Nazi persecution, seeking haven in a Promised Land; the other, victim of displacement, festering in refugee camps
On a more optimistic note, Louvish infers that seemingly invincible dictatorships can be overthrown by the sheer life-force of the human need for justice. But, above all, his horror and loathing of the carnage of war, in all its manifestations, is what the reader will remember.
The novel is shot through with the heartfelt anger that only the most accomplished satirists can muster without embarrassment. Despite an occasional urge to overload ideas, which should be cured by properly ruthless editing, Louvish triumphantly carries on the anti-war tradition established by another pdwerful Jewish novelist, Joseph Heller, in "Catch 22."
It is clear that this author subscribes to the view that it is impossible to tell the difference between the sane and the insane in our mad society. My view? You're crazy if you don't read this book.
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