Giles Foden
THE CATASTROPHIST by Ronan Bennett (Headline Review)
Those who suspected Ronan Bennett of being a novelist who lets his political enthusiasms – Irish republicanism, social justice – rein in the impulse towards a more elastic, heartfelt fiction will not have their suspicions confirmed by his new novel. Set in Congo before and after independence from Belgium, The Catastrophist confronts head-on the relationship between art and politics.
What is, what should be, the role of a writer caught up in a conflict? This is the question faced by Irish historian-turned-novelist James Gillespie, who follows his lover Ins, a reporter, to Leopoldville in 1959. Ins works for the Italian communist paper L’Unit and as such is very much biased towards the faction led by Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese nationalist leader killed by right- wing forces when independence arrived a year later.
Ins is absolutist, forceful, active (out chasing and making stories); he is uncertain, conditional, passive (sitting at home writing his novel). Only at night in bed do they meet on equal terms – Bennett is very good on sex in the tropics – but this isn’t enough to keep them together when the chaos of the post-independence period demands allegiances from even the most disengaged expatriate.
Up till then Gillespie has been able to integrate himself into the Belgian community, meeting the whole gamut of political opinion. He befriends beefy Mark Stipe, a CIA operative. The American gives him information that kicks off a lucrative freelance career, but slowly it becomes clear that Ins’s suspicions that Stipe is “the enemy” may be right.
The shadowy forces funded by the likes of Stipe will hasten the emergence of the monstrous Mobutu Sese Seko and prompt the attempted secession of the Katanga province.
The differences between Ins and Gillespie become more starkly drawn with every page. His whole being, as a novelist who tries to see all sides of the story, seems at odds with hers as a tunnel-vision activist who happens to write journalism. But Gillespie longs to get the strength of feeling that Ins has into the novel he is writing, describing it as “heartless”.
Bennett himself is anything but. This is a historical novel as well as a love story. But with the news from Congo continuing in the same vein nearly 40 years later, it has a lively currency.