The Siege
by Ismail Kadare, translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos
328pp, Canongate, £16.99
Born in southern Albania in 1936, Ismail Kadare started out as a poet before establishing himself as his country's leading novelist. French translations of his writings began to appear in the 1970s, and his growing reputation gave him a certain amount of protection under Enver Hoxha's Stalinist regime. Even so, Kadare had to tread carefully. He made compromises and wrote a few books designed to appease his critics as well as such subversive novels as The Palace of Dreams (1981). As one-party rule tottered in 1990, he claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of democratisation. Since then, he has continued to write copiously, also revising his books for republication in France. (These editions are now "official", in part because Hoxha's Albania never signed an international copyright convention.) His ongoing Complete Works, published in both French and Albanian, currently runs to 16 volumes. He's sometimes mentioned as a plausible candidate for the Nobel prize.
Kadare's novels draw heavily on Balkan history and folklore. They're also pervasively yet obliquely ironic as a result of the need to withstand political scrutiny. Combined with the UK's and US's resistance to translated fiction in general, all this has made him a harder sell in the English-language literary marketplace. In spite of various publishers' heroic efforts, he was a low-key presence in the English-speaking world until 2005, when he won the first Man Booker International prize. And not all of the anglophone interest in him, before and after he won the prize, has been friendly. His privileged status under Hoxha, his position as a delegate to the People's Assembly and - most of all - a notion that he's set up shop as a heroic former dissident: these enrage some Albanian émigrés and anti-communist writers. A neoconservative American magazine once ran an article on him with the uncompromising subtitle "Don't give the Nobel to an Albanian party hack".
It's true that publishers and journalists have sometimes reached automatically for the heroic dissident line when promoting Kadare, who hasn't always gone out of his way to press for more nuance. When asked, though, he's never claimed to be a Solzhenitsyn, arguing that such a role wasn't readily available under Hoxha's uniquely paranoid and insular regime. Until late in the day, anyone writing in open opposition to "anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism" would have been silenced or shot, famous novelist or not. Under these discouraging circumstances, any writer who ignored the canons of socialist realism could be said to have hoisted a flag of revolt, and Kadare did more than that. At the same time, spies were everywhere, misspeaking could be fatal, and any kind of place in public life called for both nimble political footwork and an ability to cope with near-constant anxiety - a situation that's depicted, among other things, in Kadare's latest novel to be translated into English, The Siege
First published in Albania in 1970 under the title Kështjella (The Castle), this is ostensibly a story of valiant national resistance, an approved theme under a government obsessed with the glories of the partisan struggle and with real and imagined threats from the outside world. It's set in the time of George Castrioti, Albania's national hero, also known as Skanderbeg and Iskander Bey. A military genius who fought the Ottoman Turks to a standstill in the early 15th century, Skanderbeg once enjoyed Europe-wide fame as the temporary saviour of Christendom, though after his death Albania fell to the Ottomans, who ruled the country until 1912. He was also venerated by Hoxha's officially atheist regime, which worked hard to connect the dictator to the heroic past. In 1970, two years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was viewed uneasily from Tirana, Kadare's setting must have seemed unexceptionable to party bosses.
It soon becomes clear, however, that this isn't going to be a sunny tale of uplifting proto-socialist derring-do. To start with, as often happens in Kadare's writing, Albania is largely seen from a foreign viewpoint, in this case that of an Ottoman army sent to capture an unnamed, rather sinister fortress. To the invaders it seems a country of gloomy winter rainstorms, stifling summers and threatening mountains inhabited by violent barbarians. Two-page sections between chapters fill the reader in on developments inside the fortress, but the Albanians are otherwise seen as incomprehensible, perhaps unknowable. Skanderbeg himself never appears: he sends messages to the defenders using beacons, but these are seen only dimly through the mist and clouds. Finally, the Ottoman commander maintains discipline "by creating imaginary dangers" and holding show trials. His council of war resembles a politburo, and his officers live in fear of the secret police, paying lip-service to abstract ideals while engaging in vicious factional infighting.
Needless to say, none of this can have seemed unfamiliar to the novel's earliest readers. And the narrator is discreetly but unmistakably sardonic about political constraints in the Ottoman camp. A mute senior officer, who communicates only by gurgling, is envied by everyone for his ability to make decisive-sounding yet impenetrable contributions to high-level meetings. The Ottomans have also brought a chronicler along to write an account of the campaign, and the novel turns a quizzical eye on his repertoire of euphemisms and meaningless phrases, his pleasure in befriending powerful officials, and his panicky feelings of moral suffocation. In the meantime, the siege grinds relentlessly on. Perhaps, an Ottoman strategist speculates, capturing a nation's castles is meaningless anyway: a serious campaign to destroy the Albanians would try to corrupt their language, their sense of their own history, "their divinities, their faith, all that they hold to be sublime".
Working from Jusuf Vrioni's French translation, itself done from a text revised in the early 90s, David Bellos has produced an English version of the book that reads well. Not too neatly allegorical, but not aiming for historical realism either, the novel comes across as a sombre Albanian cousin to Italo Calvino's and Orhan Pamuk's stories of symbolic clashes between Franks and Turks. Its stark landscape, dominated by sun, moon and rain, sometimes makes the fighters seem "more and more like shadows", especially during the clinically executed battle scenes. But Kadare's poker-faced sense of humour and eye for the characters' secret absurdities, tragic as well as comic, make the book something more than a coded protest from a cold war backwater. The urgent gestures towards something that's not quite said somehow make the story linger in the mind long after the regime under which The Siege was written went the way of the empire it dreams back to life.
· Ismail Kadare is at Hay today