Yasmina Khadra - Dead Man's Share

The soul of a nation is best discovered through the culture it has created. Paintings, music, literature, film – these all provide narrow or wide windows into the heart of what it is to be American, Australian, French, Bulgarian. Yasmina Khadra, a former officer in the Algerian army, is successful in showing the complexity and corruption of Algiers and the Algerian state in the brief period of (relative) stability and (comparatively) minimal violence after Independence and before the terrible civil war that began in the late 1980s. Dead Man's Share is 'an Inspector Llob mystery', and sees the return of the protagonist Khadra has used in several earlier works. It is a murder thriller in the truest sense, boasting a fairly ho-hum hard-boiled narrator and a series of murders escalating in violence, and scenes which serve to increase the confusion and suspense for both Llob and reader, but also, remarkably, a savage attack on the failures of the Algerian state and a persuasive critique of its problems, both wilful and accidental.

Murder is afoot and Llob (though the novel declares itself an Inspector Llob mystery, he is in fact a Superintendent), who is as yet unaware of the conspiracies with which he is about to collide, is cooling his heels at the police headquarters, bored. He is not a nice man, not really, and hard to sympathise with. We follow him about as he interacts with underlings and superiors, and as he socialises with his family. With both groups he is short, sharp, and occasionally contemptuous, though he loves his wife and dotes on his daughter. Llob is a Muslim, and seems to follow the religion's teachings with respect, not fanaticism, but he also seems to hate most everyone, and his thoughts are filled with wished-for violence upon those unfortunate enough to draw his attention. At any rate, he is a competent police-man with contacts all over Algiers, and is the man to go to when, as in Professor Allouche's case, a dangerous, insane serial killer is due to be set loose from the insane asylum he operates thanks to the intricacies of Algerian political machinations, or, when the powerful Haj Thobane needs a speedy resolution to the unfortunately amorous behaviour of one of Llob's subordinates. From these beginnings the novel spins rapidly outward, involving murders, murderers, politics, the wealthy, the educated and, above all, the sad and violent history of the struggle for Algerian independence years earlier. Everything, it seems, leads back to a time when friends could be enemies and the wrong side was only discovered after the war was completed. Llob's travels lead him to palaces and government buildings, and, later, outside Algiers to small towns where terrible atrocities were committed in the name of independence.

That's the plot, basically, but the details of it are of course best served by reading the novel itself. In Dead Man's Share's three hundred and forty or so pages, the plot widens and curls back on itself, it twists and it turns and it changes about so often that, very much like Llob himself, you will become entangled within the layers of mystery until there is nothing left to do but wait for it to untangle itself. And so it does, with suitably interesting monologues concerning the future of Algiers and the justifications by which the rich and powerful set out to destroy the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised.

This is the sort of novel where the language gives way to the message. And though this can provide some awful passages, by and large the construction of sentences and paragraphs is serviceable, if we remember that the importance of the novel lies in its condemnation of the Algerian political class. The novel has its nice touches of description, but by and large the forceful writing is displayed in the dialogue between characters, when they are able to act as a mouthpiece for viewpoints opposing or supporting Khadra's.

Khadra has a fondness for odd metaphors and similes. “My car is on its mettle again and starts devouring the kilometres the way a starving man eats a country soup” is one, and, “The manager gulps, not sure where to start, then, still wiping the corners of his mouth, which is as voracious as a moray eel, he starts squeaking”, another. My favourite is perhaps, “Her tight blouse makes her breasts leap about like two fat rabbits caught in a net.” Khadra's meaning is easy to untangle, but sentences such as these are clumsy and ill-chosen, as though he was attempting hard-boiled and could only come up with ridiculous.

An acute failing of the text is Khadra's inability to properly convey the extremes of emotions his characters experience. As Soria and Llob travel about Algeria in their efforts to unravel the mystery, they are frequently astounded by the layers of complexity their investigation uncovers, as well as how deeply ingrained the murders are into the history of Algerian independence. Khadra, however, is unequal to the task of showing just how surprising it all is. A character's face “is a waxen mask” upon learning the further history of a murdered man, and then the action continues amiably along; there are many such clumsy glosses where emotions are lazily explained.

Enough of this. The writing, as mentioned, serves the purpose of the text, which is, forgetting the murders a moment, the dissection of Algeria's sick core. Llob is, in his own way, something of a philosopher, his thoughts, when not concerned with hurting someone, turning to the matter of Algeria and its past and current predicaments. “Algiers hasn't completely lost her soul; and yet, wherever your gaze washes up, you see that things aren't going well.” and “Nothing is really calm in this country, neither in our heads nor in our streets.” are examples of his thoughts.

Not everyone is convinced that Algeria is rotten. He is told by turns, that, “Life and death, Good and Evil, chance and fate, they're all the same; foolish theories that strive to take the place of destiny; commonplaces substituting for genuine inquiry. And so the wheel turns, sweeping millions of clones into the mix, links in the chain, complicit in the drama like the fingers of the hand gripping the nuclear weapon. Who are we, Superintendent?”

But then those in power seek to reassure Llob that Algeria is in fact on track and ready for the future: “Do you see what I'm getting at? The war's over. The enemy's gone away. The country's doing great. No murders, no attacks, no kidnappings; everything's hunky-dory.”

Yasmina Khadra's Algeria has the feel to it of a nation that, now it has achieved its independence, is unsure what to do with itself, and thus can only stagnate. The driving purpose of the people, both those ordinary and extraordinary, has faded now that their ambitions have succeeded. When a people (or even an individual) achieves everything they set out to accomplish, inevitably there is a period of despondency, a sudden absence of necessity and drive. Algeria, for Khadra, is sick and despondent, the lustre of its early days of independence peeling away like so much paint on the side of a sun-bleached house. What's left is rotten, ugly, and difficult to wholly repair.

In the end, worn down by the betrayals and the lies, the corruption and the greed, the nepotism, the bald grabs for power, the torture, the rape, the destruction, Llob angrily declaims the final revealed architect of the plot and, through him, Algeria and all its broken promises. The summation of the novel lies in this speech, one that is worth quoting, but which I will not for it is best savoured at the end of the novel, and not plunked down unceremoniously into a review. Needless to say, Khadra savagely attacks his country through Llob, condemning its many institutions and traditions, and damning it to repeat the mistakes of its past. The sadness of it is that Llob's target, a wealthy and powerful man in Algeria, responds only with further speechifying, saying, “Everyone will have his chance. The best will rise to heavens. We're finished with despotism and cant, nepotism and preferential treatment, favouritism and exclusion.” A few months after the novel was set, an uprising resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Following that, a tenuous democracy was formed which saw the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic political party, which resulted in a bloody civil war. Over 160,000 people were killed over the next decade.

Author	Yasmina Khadra Real Name: Mohammed Moulessehoul
Title	Dead Man's Share (Original Title: La part du mort)
Translator	Aubrey Botsford
Nationality	Algerian
Publisher	Toby Crime
Published	2009 (English) 2004 (French)
Pages	340
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Amazon (FR) ---Fishpond (AU)

See Also

List of Algerian authors under review

Reviews

The Complete Review
The Globe and Mail
The Green Man Review
The Seattle Times
Seeing the World Through Books (Mary Whipple)

Links

Yasmina Khadra - Author website (in French)
The Guardian (UK) - Reader, I'm a He (article on Khadra)