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Human Love

The travels of an idealist

Andrei Makine
Sceptre, 249pp, £12.99,

Simon Baker

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Simon Baker reviews Andreï Makine’s latest novel

In Andreï Makine’s previous novel, The Woman Who Waited (2006), which is set in 1970s USSR, the unnamed narrator sees through his peers’ weak ideologies; he knows that their anti- establishment stance is merely a neat justification for a life of indolence. In Human Love, Elias Almeida, a communist revolutionary, sees that many of his well-to-do comrades use their political activism as a means of escape or as preparatory research in a writing career; theirs is ‘the arrogant desire to transform other people’s lives into an “experiment”, into a testing ground for their own ideas’. Each main character seeks out real humans rather than a theoretical ‘humanity’, and both fall for women they hardly know.

The novels have similar starting-points, therefore, but while Makine’s previous protagonist stays in a small town and becomes disillusioned, Elias travels from country to country and, despite his scepticism, remains committed to the ideal of a world in which people do not kill, rape or tyrannise. He knows that his goal of bringing an end to suffering is futile, but, as he says towards the end of the book, ‘I’d have hated myself if I hadn’t fought to do so’.

Elias is Angolan. His parents are killed when opposing Portuguese rule, and the teenaged Elias finds a home in the Congo among revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, who is presented here as a somewhat risible figure who views the ‘working masses’ in the abstract and lives within the bubble of his own rhetoric. Elias travels to Moscow to study and is recruited as an agent by the Soviets, who use him to spy in various African countries in the years before the USSR’s collapse. Throughout his time as an agent he is sustained by his love for Anna, a Soviet woman whom he fell for but had to leave in order to pursue his beliefs.

Makine, though not yet especially famous in Britain, has justifiably been spoken of as a future Nobel winner. Some novelists have an eye for human detail; Makine has a microscope. Human Love is interesting for its close reading of revolutionaries and their politics, for the way Makine focuses on the ordinary so that it yields something extraordinary. However, for all its considerable cleverness, it is not among his best works. Elias succeeds as a mouthpiece for his author’s acuity better than as a character in whom we believe. He is simply too wise, especially as a teenager; it seems as though he can view the present with hindsight, which is a sure (and unwelcome) sign of an author’s presence. Structurally, the novel is not ‘through-composed’, but rather seems jerkily episodic, with Elias’s changes of location being poorly drawn together at times. There is a narrator, who met Elias when they were both temporarily captured, but he fails to bring unity to the novel. Finally, Elias’s love for Anna is not convincingly portrayed. Anna is a slight character, and we do not get either an interior view of their relationship or an idea of the strength of feeling that Elias is supposed to possess.

Human Love is not a bad novel — Makine is too insightful and the prose (translated by Geoffrey Strachan) is too good for that. However, when judged by the highest standard — that of his own previous work — it is an unsatisfying one: full of brilliant observations, but lacking a commensurately good story on which to hang them.

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