Oxonianthe Review michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 of books Voices of the Victims Narrating the Genocide in Rwanda n May 2003, I rode a bus from Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to Gashora, a village two Ihours south, with 70 men who had committed genocide or crimes against humanity nine years earlier, when between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically killed in rapid and barbaric waves of ethnic violence. The men on the bus – some as young as 19, meaning they had committed genocide crimes when they were 10 – had, along with 20,000 other detainees across Rwanda, confessed to participating in the killing spree. In return for their confessions, the prisoners were being released provi- Gil Courtemanche. sionally from the country’s sordid, overcrowded jails and transported back to their home A Sunday at the Pool in communities. Waving, cheering locals – mostly Hutus – lined the streets to welcome the Kigali. Translated by Patricia returning genocidaires as if they were a liberation army. Claxton. Edinburgh: Onboard the detainees danced and sang as they watched the prison camp recede in Canongate Books, 2003. the rear window and the red dirt roads wind homeward before them. Soon their ecstasy 258 pages. turned to frustration at the slowness of the bus as it bounced along the rutted, dusty Peter Harrell. tracks out of Kigali, then to fatigue and finally to uncertainty and fear at the realities of Rwanda’s Gamble: Gacaca their situation. They had confessed to some of the worst crimes imaginable and now they and a New Model of Transi- tional Justice. were returning to the same communities where they had committed those crimes. What New York: Writers Club reception awaited them? After nine years, would their overjoyed friends and families, or Press, 2003. 130 pages. the friends and families of their victims, be there when they got off the bus? Gil Courtemanche’s novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, and Peter Harrell’s academic text, Rwanda’s Gamble: Gacaca and a New Model of Transitional Justice, offer complemen- tary accounts of both the situation that saw the dancing genocidaires imprisoned in the first place and the situation into which they have been released. Courtemanche offers a fictional description of the genocide and the lives of those who experienced it firsthand, while Harrell examines what should be done to bring genocide suspects to justice. Both of these books are firsts. A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is the first fictional account of the Rwandan genocide published in English (and, to my knowledge, only the second fictional work ever based on this subject, after Jean-Pierre Campagne’s little-known 1997 novella Les Vacances de Dieu). Rwanda’s Gamble constitutes the first lengthy scholarly examination by a Western academic of “gacaca” (pronounced ga-CHA-cha and derived from the Kinyarwanda word meaning “on the grass”), a traditional Rwandan form of communal conflict resolution that has been controversially revitalised and reformed to handle cases related to the genocide. The suspects who were recently released from jail are slated to In this issue continued on page 8 Extraordinary Growing Pains Money and Language and Yellow Dog Women Pornography Grace Felicity James on Gillian Dow on The Tom Chatfield on April Warman Stephen Burley on Carol Shields’ life Order of the Phoenix Martin Amis’ Money on Geoffrey Hill’s Martin Amis’ Latest and work Orchards of Syon Novel page 4 page 6 page 13 page 16 page 2 page 2 oxonian review of books michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog he prophets of doom have been relationship with K8, (who claims ‘the best Tenjoying themselves in recent months prix r small & soft’), are described with a composing Martin Amis’s literary obituar- comic and linguistic flair that characterises ies, and his latest novel, Yellow Dog, has Amis at his very best. The third strand been proclaimed the futile flailing of a involves London godfather-figure Joseph middle-aged writer desperately trying to Andrews, whose violent escapades with recapture the genius of his youth. Much Keith the Snake and run-ins with Xan’s fa- of this melodramatic reaction was incited ther Mick are retold in the format of Amis’ by Tibor Fischer’s ‘killer preview’ in The source, Mad Frankie Frazer’s trilogy of Telegraph of 4 August. Fischer’s deeply per- autobiographical reminiscences. Then there sonal invective against Amis and his agent are the episodes surrounding the reigning Andrew Wylie (who Fischer himself parted monarch Henry IX, whose stupidity, and Martin Amis. company with some years ago), is as offen- whose dependence on the servants Bug- Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape, sive as it is ridiculous, and it is no coinci- ger and Love, is perhaps Amis’s attempt to 2003. 340 pages. dence at all that Fischer’s new novel was provide a distorted glimpse of life under published on the very same day as Yellow the future Charles III. This critique of the Dog. Indeed, such literary scavengers have contemporary royal household continues been dogging Amis for quite some time when Henry’s daughter, Princess Victoria, now and one shudders to think what would becomes the centre of a scandal involv- happen if Amis did actually produce a ter- ing a video of her bathing naked with two rible novel. Although it is true that Yellow ‘pretty Arab boys’. And, finally, there are Dog doesn’t quite match the standard set by the fragments detailing the difficulties and Money or London Fields, it is still a dizzying eventual crash of flight 101 Heavy, carrying journey into a parallel universe written with the corpse of Royce Trainer. Amis’s characteristic dark humour. It would be wrong, however, to give There are five principal narrative strands the impression that Yellow Dog is merely a within Yellow Dog. First, there is the story comic foray into an eccentric world: it is of the main protagonist Xan Meo, the much more. Amis engages with contem- London writer/actor with roots in the porary culture like no other writer of his underworld of the East End. Meo, hav- generation, and there are dark undercur- ing a quiet drink on the anniversary of rents below the surface of the novel. The his divorce from his first wife Pearl, gets obscenification of every day life resulting attacked by mobsters and suffers a seri- from tabloid journalism and email cul- Then there are ous head injury. This event has a lasting ture, the primordial violence of man, the the episodes psychological effect and transforms him tortured relationships between men and surrounding the from the perfect husband and Renaissance women, the inability of parents to protect reigning monarch Man to a primordial state in which he their children from society and ‘the thing Henry IX, whose perpetually lusts for sex, rapes his wife, and which is called world’, incest, the monarchy behaves incestuously towards his young as an institution, the war on terrorism – all stupidity, and daughter Billie. Next is Clint Smoker, the are addressed by Amis with his entertaining whose depend- abominable hack at the Daily Lark, who spite and venom. ence on the serv- lives in a disgusting semi in Foulness and The novel begins with an allusion to ants Bugger and whose miniscule penis is a constant con- Dickens, and at times the reader suspects Love, is perhaps cern. Perfectly in tune with the ‘wankers’ that Amis is about to contrive a Dickensian Amis’s attempt to (i.e. ‘readers’) and ‘wankership’ of the Lark, ending that brings all of the characters provide a distort- Smoker’s journalistic talents are much together, but the novel instead expands and admired. His attempts to increase the bulk fragments in a post-modern imbroglio. At ed glimpse of life of his ejaculations to ‘porno proportions’, times the references to September 11, the under the future his disappointing sexual encounters with war on terror and the difficulties of flight Charles III female escorts, and his blossoming email continued on page 11 michaelmas 2003 . volume 3 . issue 1 oxonian review of books page 3 the Oxonian Review of books From the Editor The City and the University http://www.oxonianreview.org After working in corporate mergers & only in an economic but also in a sort acquisitions research in the City for two of personal, emotional sense (everyone Editor in Chief years, I came up to Oxford in September seems to know someone who was talking Leonard Epp 2001 to begin working on my DPhil in to someone in the World Trade Center at English literature. Life in the City is quite the time) – but in my experience the attack Executive Editor exciting, and it was especially exciting in the and its consequences find more robust Rachel Carrell midst of the millennial tech-boom market articulation in places like Oxford, where Business Staff optimism and its subsequent decline. When we have the potential (and the time) for Emily Travis you work in the City, you get to ride a cosy daily interaction with people who have tube to work every morning, rush to work widely different motives, forms of exper- Editors from the station, and work until 9pm or tise, and types of professional experience. Kristin Anderson so, six days a week if you’re lucky; then Oxford in Michaelmas 2001 was the kind Chris Bradley you get to rush to the pub, drink quickly, of place that showed exactly how exciting Josh Cherniss rush home and go to bed for a few hours and productive university life can be: liberal Phil Clark before you get to get up again.