The Book of Memories

In a surge of critical severity at the start of his career, Angus Wilson told a BBC radio audience that the purpose of “The Novel” was to account for the presence of evil in the world. Even then, I suspect, few listeners paused at the kitchen sink, squeezing out the last of the green Fairy Liquid, to murmur their assent, but 50 years on, it’s obvious that we expect much, much less from the genre. Evil is still welcome but chiefly as a prop or an effect, like the fake burn marks in the end pages of Will Self’s devilish “My Idea of Fun.” Horror and crime novels apart, evil seems to have faded in literary urgency, either because it evaded us with its renowned slipperiness--shape-shifting, melting into shadows--or because true evil has little entertainment value.

“Three Apples Fell From Heaven,” Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s sobering debut novel, is about the persecution and murder of several hundred thousand Christian Armenians in Turkey during World War I, an event known as the Armenian genocide but which the Turks continue to deny. Even last year, when the French government formally acknowledged that the genocide did occur, there was a flurry of diplomatic panic and an angry rebuttal from Turkey. Here is evil, not at all specific to Turks: the oldest kind of evil, a force that almost any of us will succumb to if clannishness is given absolute license. Marcom refrains from trying to explain the genocide in these or any other terms, making only oblique references to the rise of nationalism and to religious hatred. Her focus is on the Armenians and in giving voices to the dead.

Although the novel is presented in a series of lyrical, out-of-sequence vignettes featuring an array of characters, the three figures we return to most often are a young Armenian girl, Anaguil, whose parents arrange for her to be hidden and “adopted” (in exchange for weekly payments of gold) by her father’s former Turkish business partner; an adolescent Armenian poet named Sargis, whose mother, certain that only men would be taken, dresses him in women’s clothes and hides him in the attic; and Mr. Davis, the American consul at Mezre, three miles from Harput in Asiatic Turkey, who, though helpless to intervene, sends gruesome reports of the deportations and massacres of the local Armenians to his superiors in the Foreign Service, describing a lake overflowing with bodies and corpses stacked along the roadsides of Anatolia. Despite his apparent empathy, Davis nevertheless is moved to add that “one of the saddest commentaries on American missionary work among the Armenians is their lack of religious and moral principles and the general baseness of the race.” Eventually Davis flees Turkey, leaving behind his Armenian mistress, pregnant with his child.

As Davis’ dispatches make clear, the Armenian men were the first to be targeted, either conscripted into the army and sent without clothes or provisions to the Russian front or killed outright--often in creative ways--by the gendarmerie. The Armenians were not a plentiful people even before the genocide, and their language (its own branch of Indo-European) and their learning were their greatest sources of pride. Book burnings and the forced dispersal of Armenian household goods were efficient means of cultural attack. The war against the women was more complex. Those who were not killed or deported in the first and second waves of brutality were allowed to remain for a while, although with their men gone, they had no money and no means of earning any. The limited freedoms they had enjoyed in the Armenian community, including permission to go to school and to buy and sell goods, were stripped from them; the most Turkish women typically saw of street life was filtered through latticed windows. When the orphaned Anaguil ventures out alone to buy an egg, the Turkish merchant assumes she is willing to trade herself.

Although the world of the Armenian Turks is vividly rendered by Marcom, who is half Armenian, her book is more like a photograph album than like a traditional story. Her use of time--her refusal to put her narrative into chronological order--underscores the horrors she describes, suggesting that, just as there is no real beginning to cruelty and oppression, there is no ending. She darts between the sunny past before the killings began--orchards rich with plums and apricots, the smell of honey in baklava, the gossip and sensual displays of the bathhouse--and the almost unbelievable abuses suffered by the Armenians. Near the end, she slips in a single vignette from a later period, after the war, in which Anaguil has managed to make a new life for herself in Lebanon. Whether she could be termed a survivor is another matter.

“Three Apples” is a rich and unconsoling novel, in which readers are thrust from one violent act to another, uneasy witnesses to exile, the gouging of eyes, rapes, dismemberments, burnings. With a combination of gritty imagery and precise, acid-etched prose, Marcom proves the power of words against forgetfulness. If only they had enough power to hold off the timeless malevolence of ethnic hatred.