FICTION: LAURENCE MACKINreviews The Galley SlaveBy Drago Jancar, translated by Michael Biggins Dalkey Archive Press, 376pp. £17.99
A TOTALITARIAN REGIME that brooks no dissenters, and a place where no crime, in thought or deed, is too minor to go unpunished; a country sick with paranoia, its citizens spending half their lives in fear of the armed agents of their rulers, and the other half betraying their neighbours to the same oppressors; and an Everyman hero struggling at the foothills of larger truths that torment him day and night, realisations whose mere discussion will almost certainly lead to a painful death.
In his novel The Galley Slave, first published in 1978, Drago Jancar treads thematic paths familiar in modern literature – the above could be a description of Nineteen Eighty-Four– but this is a novel set on the cusp of modernity, amid the chaos of late-medieval Europe. The oppressive atmosphere Jancar creates is visceral and immediate, which is unsurprising given that Jancar, regarded as one of Slovenia's finest writers, is deeply familiar with totalitarian regimes.
Born in Maribor in 1948, he was critical of the ruling communist regime from his student days and throughout his journalistic career. He served a prison term for "spreading hostile propaganda" after bringing home a booklet from Austria about the 1945 massacre of Slovene Home Guard war prisoners by Tito's regime. This led to his work being banned from publication, but after gradual reform in the 1970s he found work as a screenwriter and playwright, and in 1982 he was a cofounder of the journal Nova Revija, which was the main voice of opposition in Slovenia. His novels and plays have won him a host of awards, including the 2011 European Prize for Literature.
Like Jancar's perhaps most famous book, Northern Lights, The Galley Slavebalances a fascination with sprawling regimes – be they empires, churches or the machinery of government – with an unsure if resilient individual struggling to exist amid the mayhem. Johan Ot is a reluctant rebel, who struggles with inner demons that he imagines have been put there by the devil himself. For reasons that are rarely clear, he tears his way around Europe, no sooner setting down the most cursory roots than ripping them up again, creating unease and mistrust around him by the sheer force of his restlessness.
This is a Europe in which “not a year had gone by without almighty God thundering his righteous anger down upon the sinful land. And he showed remarkable ingenuity in the process.” Anyone who stands out from the crowd, in thought, form or deed, is considered dangerous and subversive. “A person who doesn’t sleep sits up through the wee hours, his dark thoughts spinning through the empty rooms or venturing out into the dead of night.”
Johan Ot is certainly such a person. He wheels from one crisis to another, trying to hide his scepticism of, and disdain for, institutional religion and his fellow citizens’ blind belief in witchcraft, the Catholic Church and the purgative powers of the pyre. He looks for fellow-travellers, but always tentatively, because the Inquisition and its spies are everywhere. Jancar is masterful at instilling this relentless paranoid tension from the opening pages, where every peasant is an informer, every merchant a cut-throat and every child a betrayer in disguise.
Ot learns the hard way about seeking help, and resolves to keep his thoughts to himself: “He would clear his own path through the tangle of the universe.” But it is not long before his actions bring him into contact with other revolutionaries, be they devils at the crossroads or cults in the forest, and then there is the unholy terror of the plague, which nibbles at the edges of the earlier pages before infecting the heart of this tumultuous plot.
This is dark and decadent stuff from a writer who is a master of his craft. The novel Q – written by a group of four Italian anarchists under the pen name Luther Blissett, since changed to Wu Ming – similarly took as its backdrop a Europe hell-bent on tormenting its population at the behest of the church. Whereas Q is a thrilling, swashbuckling read that tears along at a rate of knots, The Galley Slave is a much more measured, but no less intriguing, work. Jancar has spent his life dealing in uncomfortable truths, and the heart of this book is no less urgent for beating at a few centuries’ remove.
Laurence Mackin is an Irish Timesjournalist
