APEIROGON by Colum McCann

I found this a completely immersive experience to read. It would not be everyone's cup of tea in its meandering, short chapter, snippet style of writing, with random and connected facts slipped in all over the place. But I found it beautiful to read, never really giving you time to dwell too much on one aspect before you are gently prised away to be challenged by another tiny facet or snippet, delicately and sometimes not so delicately, related to the whole. Being able to say at the end of a chapter I will get on and do whatever it is that needs doing takes on a whole new meaning with 1000 'chapters' ranging in size from 1 line to a few pages. 

An apeirogon is a geometry term for an infinitely sided and faceted polygon shape, and so the structure of the novel is a fine illustration of this concept. It also, to me, illustrates the appalling catastrophe of the Palestine-Israel conflict that has been going on for decades and decades now, with no end in sight. But as with everything in life, there is hope, and this is the key theme of the novel - we have it within ourselves as human beings to try to find a way out of this terrible mess that affects the whole world. 

The author has taken the real close friendship between a Palestian man whose 10 year old daughter was shot in the street by an Israeli soldier, and an Israeli man whose 14 year old daughter was killed in a suicide bomb. Just two of many hundreds of such tragedies that have occurred in this horribly conflicted land. The commonality of such 'incidents' never negates or dulls the terrible traumas these are to the families of those who are killed. And that is what this book is about - taking these two deaths as the central core of the relationship between the two men and the shape their lives take. 

At the same time, the reader learns about this Middle East conflict, going back to the time of Jesus' crucifixion, the Crusades, the Holocaust, the establishment of a Jewish homeland after WWII, the daily lives of both Israelis and Palestinians, the security processes and challenges, the humiliations. I am not sure if the author is trying to be fair and reasonable to both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, but I felt a strong bias in favour of the Palestinians. Not that this is a bad thing - I think it is pretty clear as we learn more that the Palestinians have been treated very badly by the creation of the state of Israel. But this is not the place to get into politics, and the author doesn't do this either, the book full of facts. 

I have read three other novels by this author and there are threads from these novels in this one, which just made me enjoy this one more. I loved the others, but this is in a different league from his other novels. Outstanding really.