Saba and Sandro get a cryptic email from Irakli saying he’s in trouble,on the run and heading for the mountains,the Caucasus. Sandro goes in search,and when he too vanishes,Saba heads for Georgia. But Sandro has left clues for him graffitied on walls,and even Irakli has squirrelled away pages from one of his Beckett-like plays in various places. It’s a quest with a peculiar sort of thread to follow.
Tbilisi is both a strange and familiar place to him when he returns after nearly 20 years. The voices of the dead and disappeared are in his head;a flood has washed the zoo down river and animals,including Boris the hippopotamus,have escaped and are wandering the streets,and Saba falls in with Nodar,a moustachioed taxi driver with a talent for baroque curses,a quest of his own,and a generosity that exemplifies the Georgian mantra,“a guest is a gift from God”.
Vardiashvili says he struggled with getting that phrase accurate. “It’s two words in Georgian and it’s so elegant. It rolls off your tongue and it sounds much prettier. That was the best way I could get it to work.”
When he returned to Georgia for the first time,it was after 17 years when he was pushing 30. There was no hunt for his mother,because she had visited London and even lived there for a spell,but he did go with his stepbrother as neither was brave enough to go alone. The experience was distinctly weird. As Saba says in the novel,“this city’s littered with memories that await me like landmines”.
“That’s what made me want to start writing this book. Even if just to make sense of that experience in my head,because when we landed in Georgia,it felt like I was back in my childhood. All of a sudden,I was greeting relatives and friends who had aged years since I last saw them. It was very strange.”
While the inspiration for the book is strongly autobiographical and the beginning “is definitely me” the further you go into the book,Vardiashvili says,the more the main character and his creator diverge.
The picture of Georgia in 2010 when the book is set in the aftermath of war,with corruption everywhere,the society and its institutions in a state of collapse,is a backdrop that allows Saba’s quest to play out in an increasingly dramatic fashion across the country and up into the north of the country and the isolated village of Ushguli,renowned for its medieval defensive towers attached to the houses,close to the fragile border with South Ossetia.
Vardiashvili was well into writing the first draft of the book when there was an irresistible story on the BBC about the animals escaping from Tbilisi zoo. “It just fell on me from above. I thought I have to steal that,there is no way I could have come up with that myself.”
The title of the book comes from the opening of the Brothers Grimm story Hansel and Gretel and there are references to European fairytales throughout. His knowledge of them and Georgian and Russian folk tales was instilled in him by his grandmother who would take him to Tbilisi botanical gardens every weekend and read them to him. He grew up on those harsh tales,and says he loves them.
He also adored that grandmother. After leaving Georgia,he never saw her again. “Back then,in the ’90s,the only affordable way to communicate was by letter. So,the tattoo on my arm is the last letter I received from her before she passed.”
So who or what is Leo Vardiashvili now? Yes,he’s an acclaimed author whose first book was snapped up by publishers after he laboured on it for years while working in business management and who is already 20,000 words into the next one. But who is he? Georgian or British?
“I feel 90 per cent Georgian when I’m in Georgia and I feel 90 per cent British when I’m in the UK. I’ve lost that 10 per cent;I don’t where it’s gone or who’s stolen it.″
Hard by a Great Forest is published by Bloomsbury at $32.99.
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