If every author, as Martin Amis put it, faces 400 decisions per page, then the first must be: how do I start my novel? The first option is a slow-burn build-up, atmospheric and establishing the setting of the book to draw the reader in – but this carries a risk of losing the less patient. The second way is to crash straight into drama, pelt the reader with juicy details and get them while they’re still reeling from the impact. The risk here is: can you keep it up?
Leo Vardiashvili is firmly in the second camp with his first novel. Perhaps this is not so surprising – debut novelists have a tendency to throw a life’s experience and knowledge into their books, for fear of not getting the chance to do it again – but the good news is that he can keep it up.
Vardiashvili came to the UK with his family from the former Soviet satellite state Georgia at the age of 12, in 1995, and so, give or take a few years, did his narrator, Saba. And it’s via this flight that we’re thrown straight into the action. Why did they leave Georgia? “You’ll find that a volley of AK-47 rounds fired right down your street will override almost every other concern.” How did they leave? “Shady bribes, stolen travel stamps, and counterfeit certificates.” And who didn’t leave? “Our mother stayed so we could escape.”
Here it all is: conflict, getaway, a family split by war – and we’re still on the first page. Saba and his brother, Sandro, accompany their father Irakli to England, settling in Tottenham in north London, where they’re surprised to find “no top hats, no smog, no Holmes, no Watson, no ladies, no gents, and no afternoon tea. Not for us.” They fell short of the bribe needed for their mother Eka to escape too. Over the following years, they hear that Eka has died, but father Irakli returns to Georgia anyway, then goes missing, and is followed by son Sandro – who also goes missing. And we’re still only on page nine.
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It turns out, however, that all of this busy bustling is set-up for the main narrative: now it’s narrator Saba’s turn to head back to Georgia, to find first Sandro and then Irakli. It becomes a classic quest narrative, but delivered with a drily humorous tone and spliced with secondary elements. First, there are the dead family and friends who haunt Saba’s thoughts, such as uncle Anzor, who “donated two fingers to the Socialist Cause via the painful method of a faulty hydraulic press in a Soviet car factory”.
Second, there are the helpful recollections of how Georgia came to be such a basket-case that families wanted to flee. It was “a key strategic location for many a psychopathic empire ... Over the centuries, all manner of empires and their unhinged rulers had their way with [the capital Tbilisi] – the Ottomans, the Byzantines, the Russians.” People “lived happily ever after until the next invasion”. Once Georgia left the USSR in 1991, and the “old Soviet resources inevitably ran dry”, people “converged on the parliament building, demanding luxuries like food, gas, water and electricity”. We learn about the country’s regions in similarly sardonic terms: the “blissfully unplanned” Sololaki, or Ushguli in the Caucasus mountains, where “the air’s so thin visitors promptly faint on arrival.”
The colour and energy of Vardiashvili’s telling takes the book a long way when the quest narrative droops a little. It’s at its best when he’s confronting the local police, who have no sympathy for “fair-weather Georgians” who fled the country, and are not out to help Saba’s family at all – far from it. “They call these the Magic Cells,” a detective warns Saba in the police station. “They could make you disappear. Like magic.”
The plot is weaker when it takes flight from plausibility, such as when Saba teams up with a taxi driver he’s just met in order to help his search – “he has a face you want to trust” (we find out later just how wise that trust was) – or when the dead relatives speak to Saba: the conversations they have with him are invariably less interesting than the ones with living people. And there’s a tiring device of using pages of a play written by Irakli as a breadcrumb trail to help Saba’s quest (the book’s title comes from the opening line of the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tale Hansel and Gretel).
But the weaknesses don’t impair the overall pleasure. In the end, Hard by a Great Forest is a tough and funny book that sets its face with admirable firmness against compromise. It also benefits from first mover advantage: a rare English-language novel about Georgia. Expect more to come, even if they’re not as good as this.
