Oral epic poetry, racial mistrust, a political intrigue which is at times as comic as it is sinister, along with clashes between the old and the new, provide the themes of Ismail Kadare's lively tragi-comedy, The File On H (Harvill, £8.99 in UK). First published in Albanian in 1981, and later in French in 1989, this is the first English translation, and is based on the French version.
Two Irish-Americans arrive in a provincial town somewhere in Albania in the 1930s. Visits by tourists are rare, if not unique, and their arrival inspires instant suspicion; the local spy is immediately recruited. While the foreigners, claiming to be folklorists, are being "entertained" by the local governor, their luggage - "Suitcases?" declares Blackie the Porter, "don't talk to me about them suitcases, for God's sake, they nearly broke my back" - is being searched by Dull Baxhaja, "otherwise known as `The Eaves', the best informer on the books".
The narrative opens in a tone of high humour. The locals are a tetchy bunch and have little patience with the visitors and their archaic approach to conversation. According to the hotel manager, "The foreigners spoke to me in Albanian but, dear me! I must confess that the language they spoke was not our usual way of speaking at all. I don't know how to explain it but it was like a tongue that was frozen in places, hard as ice, if you see what I mean."
The outsiders have come on a mission of scholarship. Both are classical scholars, intent on unravelling the complexities of Homeric composition by studying the songs of Albania's epic bards. However, as Dull the spy discovers from their papers, the pair have already decided that "we are less interested in Albanian epics themselves than in their production process, to use a modern term. We are seeking to reach by induction a truth of universal applicability: the means by which epic poetry is generated, and as a consequence the answer to the enigma of Homer."
To do this, they have to move their operation, including their recording equipment, to an inn, high in the mountains, where the rhapsodes or singers, who accompany themselves on lahutas, tend to gather.
Although elusive, the rhapsodes prove co-operative, as the innkeeper confirms: "A rhapsode who spends a night here will come back a week later, at the most two weeks later, on his way home from a wedding or a funeral or from a murder he has been to commit." His one reservation is their willingness to perform for a machine - a tape recorder - rather than a large audience. Far more difficult, however, is the remote location: "in winter even the birds can't fly over the Accursed Mountains."
The two scholars have their own problems: Max's marriage is in trouble, while Bill appears to be going Homerically blind. They are however unaware of the amount of time the governor's young, frustrated wife devotes to fantasising about them. For all her silliness, she does win our sympathy: "From time to time she was overcome by a particular kind of sadness, a slow-moving sadness like a slab of melting snow, more bearable than the pangs of real, acute melancholy." Kadare does not allow his characters to become mere caricatures and his tight narrative affords them the space to acquire some plausibility through deft characterisation. The concerns of the book are complex - the origins of oral poetry and the question of how Homeric epics came to be composed and handed down.
There are some interestingly speculative digressions, such as the question of Homer's true identity: "A poet of genius or a skilful editor? A conformist, a troublemaker, or an establishment figure? Had he been a kind of publisher of his day, the gossip columnist of Mount Olympus, or had he been a spokesman for officialdom? (Some passages in the Iliad sound quite like press releases, after all.) Or was he a leader, and, like any other leader, did he have a whole team of underlings? Or was he not any of these things, was he perhaps not even an individual, but an institution? So his name may not have been `Homer' at all, but a set of initials, an acronym that should be written H.O.M.E.R."
Much of the paranoia demonstrated by the authorities in The File on H is of course directly drawn from Kadare's personal experiences of life in Albania under Enver Hoxha's forty-year dictatorship. Most of Albania's intellectuals were lost, and Kadare's survival was ensured by his international reputation. In 1990 he sought political asylum in France.
In many ways this novel is one of the last classics to emerge from the old Eastern Europe. Aside from being a sharp and clever political satire with shades of the work of the once-banned Russian Evengy Popov, this novel is also inspired, as is explained in a translator's note, by a visit to the Balkans in the 1930s by the American folklorist Albert B. Lord in the company of the classicist Milman Parry. While attending a conference in Turkey in 1979, Kadare met Lord, who told him about that trip undertaken almost fifty years earlier. Lord and Parry - who died shortly after his return from the Balkans - had gathered an immense collection of research material - in the former Yugoslavia, not Albania - and having been successfully shipped to the United States, it is still held in the library at Harvard University. Bill and Max are rather less successful. Intruders break in and destroy all their material as well as their tape recordings.
Considering that David Bellos has rendered this fluent, elegant and atmospheric translation of an eloquent, engaging and poignant work from another translation, testifies not only to Kadare's genius but to the art of the translator as well.
