A biblical flood that saw escaped zoo animals wandering the streets of the Georgian capital Tbilisi furnishes the surreal backdrop of Leo Vardiashvili’s debut. A compelling novel about war, family separation and ambivalent homecoming, its tale of sacrifice, guilt and betrayal is propelled by dark mysteries and offset by glorious shafts of humour.
“Our mother stayed so we could escape,” narrator Saba confesses. Like thousands of Georgians, he fled the country during the civil wars that followed Soviet collapse in 1991 and a bleak winter that “left Tbilisi wall-to-wall fucked with no electricity, no gas, no water, and no food in the shops”. Saba shares his childhood fate with the author, who arrived in London with his family as a 12-year-old refugee in 1995. Writing in English, Vardiashvili joins novelists such as Nino Haratischwili – who wrote The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (2014) in German – in forging a diasporic literature, linked by common strands, in languages other than their ancestral Georgian.
Prone to panic attacks, and wearing his “lucky Pink Floyd T-shirt”, Saba returns to Tbilisi in his 20s on the trail of his missing father, Irakli, and an elder brother, Sandro, who disappeared searching for him. Irakli had returned to his native land to reckon with his wife’s death in his absence, after he was cheated out of the cash to bring her to London. Summoning the ghosts of dead loved ones, Saba weighs their conflicting advice in his head during run-ins with police who confiscate his passport.
Saba’s guiding stars are the samizdat fairytales once whispered by his mother Eka, “contraband stories of wizards … and little princes” copied at great risk under Soviet rule. Words from Hansel and Gretel, graffitied by Sandro in an alley, give the novel its title. Through a trail of coded clues, Saba follows his father and brother, but the trail leads him perilously across the shifting borders of still smouldering wars.
The flood that struck Tbilisi zoo was in 2015, but is here pushed back to just two years after the Russia–Georgia war of 2008. Saba teams up with Nodar, a taxi driver from the contested zone of South Ossetia, and traverses Tbilisi, from Mtatsminda cliff with its broadcast tower, to Sololaki’s “Leninless Square”, where he witnessed the statue’s toppling as a boy. Leaving the capital, they travel from Svaneti’s snowy watchtowers in the high Caucasus to war-ruined South Ossetia, with its burned villages, salt-strewn fields, orphanages and mute, bombed children. The grim deaths contrast with Saba’s remembered fairytales, “where no one died without some heroic purpose. Some fanfare.”
“Can’t blame the Russians for everything,” Nodar says, as Saba finds Georgians fighting Georgians: soldiers repel Ossetian civilians who simply want to return home to the breakaway zone, yet are suspected as separatist traitors backing Russian occupation. “Russians, Georgians. What’s the difference?” Nodar opines. “Shell’s a shell – it still kills.”
For Nodar, “tomorrow’s hangover is proof of today’s sins”. In a former colony where “comrade” in Russian is a needling insult implying collaboration, Georgia’s post-Soviet hangover persists in torture chambers beneath new police stations, and callous systems that corrupt honest men.
Vivid scenes range from Saba’s shocked return to his childhood home, where “memories await like landmines”, to a crossing through glacier meltwater. Many are both heart-wrenching and comic, such as a bereaved couple in a graveyard indignant at the poor quality of the libation (“Wine isn’t in our blood. It is our blood”). Pages bristle with minted expressions: a “waddle” of penguins; the “idling tremble” of an alcoholic’s hands. Hospital visitors see “heads pop up from rusting steel-frame beds like sickly meerkats”.
If Eka launched her sons on fairytale flights of imagination, their “superhero uncle” Anzor rooted them in historical legends about heroic forebears making last stands against invading empires, defending “everything that makes a Georgian a Georgian” – books, poetry, paintings, relics, grapevine cuttings. While embracing this culture, the novel pushes back against martial values. “Those people hold grudges past the grave,” Irakli despairs. Saba’s heart, too, wounded by treachery, “hardened overnight, the way hearts do”. Yet, distinguishing between forgivable betrayals and those too heinous to grasp, he learns to let go of vendetta. Urging him to “break the cycle” because “someone has to”, his grandmother Lena’s counsel hints at a long overdue reckoning with a divided past. Novels such as this might help light the way.
• Maya Jaggi is founding director of the annual programme of Georgian literature and culture at the Oxford literary festival, launching on Sunday 17 March 2024.
• Hard By a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
