“On the Isle of Antioch” by Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf (via Wikimedia Commons)

Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island with Ève, a novelist who had one cult hit years before and who has retreated into isolation; they rarely if ever see each other.

This changes when all the electricity and communications cut out one morning: no radio, no radio anywhere, no cellphone reception, no power. This is not, as Alexandre (and we) first suppose, the result of the nuclear war that had been apparently imminent, but rather the opposite. A mysterious group who have been living apart, in occultation one might say (although that is not the word the book uses), since the time of Ancient Greece, step in—with superior and miraculous technology—to save humanity from itself. They call themselves (somewhat pretentiously, it must be said) “the friends of Empedocles”, Emedocles of Agrigento being a philosopher who died “by throwing himself into the crater of a volcano.” They are calm and deliberate and all carry names like Agamemnon (Agam for short) and Demosthenes.

The calamity, about which Ève is ebullient, brings her and Alexandre together.

 

On the Isle of Antioch, Amin Maalouf, Natasha Lehrer (trans) (World Editions, December 2023)
On the Isle of Antioch, Amin Maalouf, Natasha Lehrer (trans) (World Editions, December 2023)

There is a plot to On the Isle of Antioch, here in translation by Natasha Lehrer, but Maalouf is writing a parable; verisimilitude (other than in the human relations between characters) is not the apparent objective. Although the premise is the hardly original one that our current civilization is rotten and dying, that doesn’t seem to be Maalouf’s main point; he instead seems to be asking whether it is really better for humanity to be saved from itself by some higher power. Alexandre himself muses that:

 

Throughout history, people have seen their civilizations become obsolete. Every time a traditional culture has come into contact with a more powerful and sophisticated society, a portion of humanity has experienced a kind of ending of their world. The example that keeps coming to mind is the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492. But there are others. One might argue that over the last few centuries many non-Western societies—India, China, Japan, the Muslim East, sub-Saharan Africa—have seen their medicine, and arguably all their traditional knowledge, fall into disrepute and then gradually be forgotten.
      The difference is that up until now, when one of our civilizations lost power, creativity, glory, prestige, and dignity, all that was salvaged by another. Never, until now, has the entirety of our humanity suffered such an all-encompassing loss of prestige. And never, to my knowledge, not even in the case of the Aztecs, has the blow been so sudden.

 

The analogy isn’t quite exact: the conquistadores were hardly benign and the indigenous people were able, some of them anyway, to adapt and adopt the new technology. But the devices of “the friends of Empedocles” seem beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. These visitors are more like aliens (we’ve read that novel before) or, perhaps, angels. It kind of goes wrong, though. The “unexpected brothers” of the French title are hardly infallible.

It’s also rather hard to imagine an American writing a book like this, with the United States and the American President more or less rolling over (in the face of a bunch of people with Greek names, no less). Maalouf’s America is as imaginary as the “friends”.

 

One can get a sense in reading On the Isle of Antioch of having been here before; the themes figure in other dystopian and speculative fiction, as does the love story that develops during and apart from, despite and because of, the maelstrom engulfing humanity. What stands out is Maalouf’s prose. There is erudition here; Alexandre displays a perhaps gallic predilection for philosophizing. The characters—the meaningfully-named Ève, the mysterious Agamemnon, Alexandre himself—maintain interest. And while the plot seems more vehicle for philosophical musing than an end in itself, it is far from predictable.

For those who know Maalouf from his historical fiction, such as Leo Africanus or Balthasar’s Odyssey, this most recent novel will seem like something of a change of pace, except perhaps in Maalouf’s concern for larger issues and the humanity of the characters.


Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.