Apeirogon

 This is the centre of gravity, Colum McCann writes in his novel of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Apeirogon, this is where it all comes down. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. As I have always said, it's a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy any more, he just can't be. 

And this paragraph in itself is the center of the novel, the idea that everything circles back to--and there is much of everything herein. The novel is as much structure as narrative, presented inventively in 1001 vignettes (evoking the Arabian Nights), each building on the other, each referring to yet another, an ever mounting compendium of images and events, everything ultimately centered on the death of two teenage girls, one the daughter of an Israeli, one the daughter of a Palestinian.

This will not end until we talk is a recurrent phrase throughout the novel, the roughly 500 pages of which concerns the many variations of what we need to talk about and how we might get there, even though the essential answer is clear enough: the senseless death of two innocent girls. The beginning and the end. 

Colum's style here is all about cumulative effect, a relentless palace, brick upon brick, of both human nobility and human weakness, wherein the observer sometimes soars with hope and is sometimes suddenly reduced to tears. 

I do not see the originality of the form here as being somehow the new shape of the novel in general, as some critics effusively suggest. It is simply one of a kind, fascinating and challenging in and of itself, a creature that is part Hemingway and part Melville. And it doesn't always work, at times seeming either overly fond of itself or altogether too obvious. And yet for the most part the accretive building blocks are compelling and thought provoking and seep down to the heart, tugging ever more tightly as the rope is pulled ever more aggressively. 

An apeirogon is a defined as a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. This may seem a contradiction in terms, yet it is appropriate for the seemingly staggering complexity of what McCann is struggling with here, the many sided, endlessly nuanced long running tragedy of these two peoples in conflict.