Makine, Andrei: Human Love. London, Sceptre, 2008. ISBN 978 0 340 97769 9
Human Love calls to mind Matthew Arnold's poem 'Dover Beach', where he describes the loss of religious faith. Towards the close of the poem, Arnold writes:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
The poem is moving because you feel that in such a sweeping loss of faith, the move to find strength in a personal relationship will not really work. Faced with the demand that she supply the depth of meaning that has been lost, any woman to whom a poet joined himself in this exhortation would surely pause before what was being asked of her.
This would not be the end of argument. Pillow talk and pillow fight, a series of more recriminatory exchanges, would surely follow until more realistic expectations of the relationship were negotiated.
Andrei Makine's short novel, Human Love, enters Arnold's territory. Makine, who was born in Russia, writes in French. In his novels he explores the ways in which cultures and ideologies intersect. Human Love is particularly complex because it is set in Africa.
The novel asks whether, in the face of the brutal ways in which human beings treat one another, it is possible to believe in humanity and in human beings. Elias, the moral centre of the novel, finds reason to believe in small experiences of love and beauty.
Elias is Angolan. As a child he sees the brutality, lust, racism and greed that mark the end of the colonial regime. His mother is degraded and killed. But he also has a poet's eye for the beauty of simple things and of human relationships.
His belief in human freedom takes him on a long journey. He finds himself with Che Guevara in an African campaign, studies the making of mayhem in Cuba and Russia, and works with insurgent movements in Angola, the Congo and Somalia.
In his journey he discovers that ideological commitments mask much simpler human desires for riches, revenge, control, status and sexual gratification. The same patterns of manipulation, torture, loveless couplings, and contempt are evident in rape and pillage by colonial armies, in patronage and betrayal by Western