Balthasar’s Odyssey by Amin Maalouf
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Reading Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey while the UN Security Council was voting on the latest resolution on Iraq, leads one to reflect how many of today’s problems seem to be the result of a lack of intellectual engagement between the world’s major religions and cultures—a lack of listening, in short—and that this lack of engagement is something of a historical oddity. In earlier times, there seems to have been considerably more communication, interaction and actual listening.
Balthasar’s Odyssey, while ostensibly historical fiction, is in many ways a 400-page parable illuminating the “clash of civilizations” that seems to afflict the world today. It is also a good yarn, but it this resonance with today’s issues and concerns that raises it above other novels of the genre.
Maalouf is a Lebanese-Christian who writes in French (and has won the Prix Goncourt) and is himself therefore an example of the cross-cultural synthesis he so often writes about.
The Balthasar of the title is a Genoese antique store owner living in the Levant. Balthasar’s Odyssey, set in 1665 and 1666, the latter being the “Year of Beast”, a time of troubles and portents of the Apocalypse, is the story of the search for a book might provide protection against the prophesied calamities. The book enters Balthasar’s hands, but he lets it escape and he feels he must find it.
So he sets out a journey that takes him across Anatolia to Constantinople, thence to Izmir and the Island of Chios and finally on to Genoa and London. Balthasar, a Christian, enters into an intellectual friendship with a Jew, falls in love with a married woman, watches the rise of a false Jewish Messiah, is dumped in Ottoman jails, and is almost caught in the Great Fire of London. As in all of Maalouf’s novels, it is his ability to conjure up places exotic in time and distance, and populate them with believable and appealing characters, that make this book so enthralling.
The book is filled with fascinating details of the sort that never show up in history books (at least not in mine). 1666 was considered a likely date for the Apocalypse not just because of the fateful ‘666’, but also because the date written in Roman numerals is MDCLXVI, which contains every single numeral. “The numbers are complete,” says Balthasar’s nephew. “The years are complete. Nothing more will be added.”
These leads to a discussion of the convergence of Christian and Jewish numerology, both of which could be said to point to 1666 as the year of the Apocalypse, a convergence placed in counterpoint to the intellectual and philosophical convergence Balthasar finds with his Jewish friend—for underlying the plot, the characters and details are deeper themes, one of which is that the labels that people give themselves (whether religious or national) tend to mask the many similarities and common interests and aspirations that people share.
The implication is that Christian, Muslims and Jews, Europeans and the peoples of the Middle East, have more in common that they often believe and the differences should be an opportunity for learning rather than the basis for misunderstanding and hate.
The world does not of course come to an end, all the portents of Apocalypse notwithstanding: another subtle message for today with its talk of weapons of mass destruction.
I did however find the novel a bit ragged around the edges compared with some of Maalouf’s earlier novels such as Leo Africanus and The Rock of Tanios. The farther we got from the Levant, the visits to Genoa, Lisbon and, especially, London, the more the scenes seemed somewhat contrived and rushed. Or perhaps it is that the Great Fire of London, being that much more familiar, cannot really compare a fire in an Istanbul library.
A bookclub I used to moderate asked me suggest novels that would help readers understand Islam from the inside out, and in particular, Islam’s interaction and relationship with the “West”. After Amin Maalouf, I pretty much drew a blank. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red treads some of the same ground, but Maalouf is perhaps more easily accessible and readable.
It is this ability—an almost unique ability, it seems to me—to combine readable fiction with the theme of the interaction of the Christian and Muslim worlds that Maalouf and interesting, fascinating and important writer.