The heart of Africa

Christopher Hope is impressed by Andrei Makine's exploration of love and endurance, Human Love
Human Love by Andreï Makine

Human Love

by Andrei Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

256pp, Sceptre, £12.99

Andrei Makine has exceptional gifts for getting to the heart of true feeling. His new novel, Human Love, is audacious even by his own standards, examining the paradox that, set beside savagery, love may seem a frail thing; yet without it, life is often little more than manipulation and murder. Human Love tells the story of the affair between a black Angolan revolutionary and a Russian woman who saves him from racist thugs in Moscow. Makine's coup is to measure this secret lifelong affair against the very public rape of Africa.

The story is put into the mouth of an unnamed Russian writer attending a lavish literary jamboree in Conakry, Guinea; a nicely sardonic and sensitive recorder at odds with the new Africa. During the Angolan war, while locked up by Unita rebels who might well have killed him, he occupied a prison in the bush with a badly beaten, unconscious man whom he took to be dead and whose pen he tried to steal - until the "corpse" whispered that it had run out of ink. In one of the superbly judged ironies that mark this exceptional book, the man recording the life and times of Elias Almeida, black revolutionary and Soviet agent, is using the same pen, a gift of the man he once tried to rob.

As a child in the civil war that split Angola after independence, Elias witnesses the Portuguese departure, sees his mother and father destroyed and Africa become a pawn in the cold war. Recruited by the Russians, schooled in Moscow, he is sent back to Africa as a Soviet agent. The conflicts of the 1970s and 80s in Angola, the Congo and the Horn of Africa are seen though Russian eyes.

Elias is a devout revolutionary; he believes the prophets of revolution. These beliefs are to be sorely tested throughout his life, not just by his Russian masters, but by fellow Africans whom Almeida bleakly observes assaulting their own people with energetic brutality.

As a portrait of modern Africa and its invaders, lovers and blood-letters, Human Love is never anything other than accurate. Africa in the years after the end of colonial rule became a theatre of terror mingled with bitter absurdity. If the advantage of one or other political patron required that, say, Zaire or Angola be bought, sold or merely broken, then that is what happened. It was nothing personal; it was what "history" required. As a CIA chief who worked in the Congo recalled in a recent memoir, if the Soviets had "outsmarted" the Americans in Africa, it would have been "disastrous". The Russians felt the same way. The result of this rivalry was a lot of dead people, and a culture of murder that prevails to this day.

A series of stark images haunt the narrator. Africa is the huge bloody corpse of a butchered elephant, from which everyone wants to hack a slice. Africa is the plump necks of the delegates at the Conakry literary conference the writer must endure. It is a homicidal child wearing a broken gas-mask, and it is the Zairian woman he sees raped, shot and robbed of the diamonds she has hidden in her mouth.

Along with the horror comes the sense that this is how it is; this is what history does. It is perfunctory and remorseless. History offers Elias and his lover Anna a few days in Siberia, and then separates them, except for a few chance meetings when the lovers are thrown together in different parts of Africa, always at the wrong time, always with the wrong results. Indeed, if the novel has a flaw, it is that these lovers' meetings seem too contrived to be true. But we see how, for Elias, his love for Anna is the only steady thing in a world where every one of his ideals as a young and fervent communist believer is perverted and betrayed.

Elias's biographer must also negotiate the "new" Africa, and he finds himself in those places where Africa once suffered, and now it parties: where overfed and fatuous intellectuals connive with sentimental Europeans, and where the poor still starve. Indeed, the narrator doesn't know whom he dislikes more: failed revolutionaries from the Congo to Cuba whom Elias tried hard to admire, or the posturing delegates in thousand-dollar suits at the Conakry conference discussing "African Life Stories in Literature".

Sardonic elegance is typical of Makine's beautifully judged assault on the hypocrisies of white revolutionaries and black opportunists for whom Africa was, and still is, a seductive playground. One of those who came to Africa to serve his revolutionary apprenticeship among the deserving oppressed was Ernesto Che Guevara, whose safari in the Congo at the time of independence Makine etches in acid. Like other dangerous sentimentalists who crop up in these pages, Guevara decamped in despair at the recalcitrance of the natives, who refused to understand the favour he was doing them.

Human Love is a haunting, often very tender story written in a kind of meditative fury. Its refusal to alter one whit its belief in the endurance of love in the face of appalling evidence to the contrary is what gives the novel its distinction. Makine has written one of the best novels about Africa in a long time.

· Christopher Hope's The Garden of Bad Dreams is published by Atlantic

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