One of the most affecting and important books I have read for a long time. The story of two fathers, one from Israel, one from Palestine who lose their daughters and in their unimaginable grief, unite to set up an organisation to help others and to promote peace. This is a tale of heartbreak, courage and bravery written beautifully and never descending into mawkishness or sentimentality.

From the acknowledgements:

”This is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination…”

There is a core story being told in Apeirogon. On 4 September 1997, Smadar Elhanan was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. On 16 January 2007, Abir Aramin was leaving school with friends in Anata when she was hit in the head by a rubber bullet. She died in hospital. The fathers of these two girls, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, became friends and joined forces to work for peace in one of the world’s most troubled places.

So much is known fact:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/03/men-kill-children-middle-east-israel-palestine

Apeirogon is the story of these two men. In part of the story, we follow the men almost chronologically through a day, but this is mixed with a multitude of flashbacks that fill in the details for the reader jumping around in time. We revisit some events numerous times, adding details and fresh perspectives as we go. It feels like McCann has hit the story with a hammer and carefully picked up the small pieces (there are multiple references to shrapnel through the book) and constructed something new from them.

But Apeirogon is a lot more than this. Because, as well as reconstructing the story of Aramin and Elhanan, McCann has taken a multitude of other threads, hit them all with hammers, and mixed all the pieces together before he starts re-constructing. The novel consists of 1001 fragments varying from a few pages to just a few words. Some are pictures. This means we read about bird migration, the music of John Cage, a 19th-century explorer of the Jordan river, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk over Jerusalem (https://apnews.com/017df269d150fd80d1774fad89827105), Borges’ visit to Jerusalem, and many, many other things. McCann sees connections, some of them poetic rather than literal, and presents us with a mixture, as he says, of fact and imagination that gives the reader a poetic perspective that is often profoundly moving.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Its page count suggests it is a long book, but there is a lot of white space and it doesn’t feel long (I have seen some review quotes that suggest it is too long, but that was not my experience of the book).

This is the kind of novel that is impossible to write about without feeling that you have missed out huge chunks of important information, so all I can really do is suggest you read it. You might like to watch this video clip where Bassam’s son Arab and Rami’s son Yigal share the stage together as they seek to continue their fathers’ work: https://youtu.be/oJllnXxS41M.

‘We live our lives, suggested Rilke, in widening circles that reach out across the expanse.’

Sometimes a book just hits you, reminding us why we do this. This human impulse to write, to explain, to tell stories, to explore why things just are. The basic premise is simple: two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, travel separately to a monastery in the town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, where they will both talk about their experiences of losing a child to the violence, and then they travel home again. From this, Colum McCann has created an extraordinary book that almost defies definition. The two central characters are real, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, and McCann has used extracts from interviews they have given to form the central core of the novel, the two stories from the men. In his acknowledgments at the end of the book, McCann writes:

‘This is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination.’

The title, too, gives us a way of trying to understand the book:

‘As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible. Even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, the entirety of the shape is complicit.’

The book counts up, in 500 short passages, and then counts down, in 500 more – some just one sentence, some a few pages – and weaves back and forward in time as we learn the stories behind their loss. Bassam’s daughter Abir was killed by a bullet fired by an eighteen-year-old Israeli soldier; Rami’s daughter Smadar was killed by one of three suicide bombers. At different times, the hospital to where Abir was taken and then died was the same hospital where Smadar had been born: ‘One story becoming another’. Both men end up joining the Parents Circle, a group of people from all sides in the conflict who have lost children, and this gives both men not only comfort and a place to talk, but also a meaning and a purpose.

McCann weaves in a remarkable collage of references, from birds to popular music to historical figures. Everything is connected, the very fragmentary nature of the book giving us an intense magnification of a singular fact or moment; zoom out and the fragments start to take shape. The book is very much from the point of view of the two men, a male discourse in which we see the daughters and the wives, but only through another perspective. Rami’s wife, Nurit, is a university professor, and she indeed has written on the subject of the conflict (which McCann cites in the course of the book). Bassam’s wife, Salwa, chooses not to speak out, choosing devotion and supplication to try to understand. Whilst the novel lacks their voices, they are not superfluous characters, and I think McCann does the daughters and the wives justice.

Myth-making and creation stories; photographs; mathematical analysis of amicable numbers; seemingly random stories and real-life characters; and birds, so many references and allusions to birds. McCann’s novel is an ambitious, multi-layered and extraordinary work. Like a recurring theme, the book of ‘Arabian Nights’ comes up again and again, and indeed the fragments in the novel number 1001.

It’s almost impossible to describe this. Like a murmuration of starlings, or a musical theme, there are ripples, connections, associations, juxtapositions. The writing is lyrical and heart-breaking at one moment, clinical and observant at another. The layers and different perspectives give the reader, ultimately, a remarkable picture of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and its utterly human cost. It may have imperfections, but this is a simply remarkable tour-de-force from Colum McCann, a genre-defying, profoundly moving and remarkable piece of writing that will haunt you long after you finish it. Some books you simply must read. This is one of them.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)