Former journalist David Savill’s fiction debut, ‘They are Trying to Break Your Heart’, is searing

If, as Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1959, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” then things are not going at all well in the parallel lands that are the setting for David Savill’s searing debut novel, “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.” In its first 100 pages, in scenes in Bosnia during the war from 1992-95, and 10 years later in London and Thailand, terrible cruelties are visited on a variety of animals. The intimation, and soon enough a good deal more, is that they are proxies for the savagery we practice on one another.

Obvious? Yes. And no. Savill, a British journalist who was on the ground both in Bosnia during the war and in Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami a decade later — the locations of the two disparate disasters his book seeks to conjoin — builds his fictional case on an armature of such height it can be a dizzying climb. But attain the top we do. All thanks to a sheer amazement that compels us upward just to find out how such an intricate structure could have been conceived, much less made.

No small additional encouragement is the author’s ability to explore moral complexities in lean and evocative prose, with a light hand on the symbolism.

“They descend the hairpins over the valley at Jasenica. The only road barrier is the flickering yellow tape indicating a mined area. The van clatters over the potholes. Vesna says nothing. When they turn onto the Zagreb road, the indicator doesn’t cancel itself, and when he tries to turn it off, it switches in the other direction, then back again, before mysteriously stopping.”

They are on their way to a wartime disaster.

Employing the style of cross-cutting and montage that has become de rigueur for any contemporary novel that pretends to seriousness or currency, the author charts a zigzagging course across time and geography for four main characters who will, of course, come together in the end. Or attempt to, at any rate. If they occasionally resemble elaborately made vessels rather than breathing human beings, the author may be excused: The aim of “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart” is to take on pretty much every one of the Important Subjects. Family, love, responsibility, desire, memory, lust, death and the unspeakable — all these and more are stitched through a plot that ranges across 10 years of time, half a world, and a couple dozen characters.

Borrowing fast cutting from cinema increases the tension in literature too. But before you can worry about any outcome you have to figure out who is who and what what. It’s hard to care when you aren’t quite sure what you’re caring about. Savill has set himself a difficult project at the get-go: introducing the several characters whose lives will enmesh across time and space. There is Anya Teal, researcher for human-rights organization Dignity Monitor (master’s thesis: rape as a war weapon in the Balkan conflicts); date and places of operation, 2004, London and Khao Lak, Thailand. Marko Novak is a Croat whose family, friendships and very youth are torn along the same essentially arbitrary lines as those that ripped apart his country; 1991–95 and 2005, England and Bosnia and Herzegovina. William Howell, Brit and Anya’s former significant other, crops up in 2004 and 2005, before and after the tsunami that in moments swept away the lives of over 230,000 people. The last of these, paradoxically most affecting, is Kemal Lekić, Marko’s best friend, soldier, war hero and war criminal, savior-victim-perpetrator; all this time, everywhere and nowhere.

Premonitions gather. Swimming in the Indian Ocean provides aching foreshadows of loss. As with spices in a recipe, these must be judiciously added, or else the dish is ruined. Savill is a clever cook, if one overly fond of the notion that if nutmeg is good, then some cumin, chile, garlic and pepper will be even better. Savill’s is a mash-up of the international thriller and novel of ideas (he has Marko briefly expound on the history of war in postwar Europe, a march around the continent that sequentially threw whole populations across new borders) and it succeeds measurably in both. His book makes a good case that a search for the guilty party is both the ultimate narrative driver and a terrifically complex concept: it is what we are all running to, or from.

The darkly troubling crime at the heart of the plot is that of rape, the most potent weapon in war’s arsenal. Its casualties are unceasing, radiating. Savill brings a harrowing concreteness to its use, even when it is off-screen: Anya visits a “rape camp” where years before Muslim women had been imprisoned and brutally dehumanized. Now, “Inside the house was a terrible silence” — the silence of those who knew what happened there, and who 10 years later she attempts to make speak. (Its real counterpart, Savill reports in an appendix, is the center of a still unsuccessful effort to make it a memorial. Anya’s aims are true.)

In “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart” Kemal speaks the least, but he says nearly all. A shadowy figure in a chiaroscuro portrait of man’s inhumanity to man, he emerges as most fully human, which is the true tragedy of which Savill writes.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is a critic and the author of five works of nonfiction.

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“They Are Trying to Break Your Heart”

By David Savill

Bloomsbury: 368 pp., $27