The speed of light

Someday this war's going to end...

Of course, that quote is not from The Speed of Light; if you know your movie history you’ll hear Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. It’s one of many darkly ironic lines in one of the best movies ever made; he’s just wiped out a Vietnamese village to give his soldiers somewhere to surf, and since he has no clue that the movie he’s in (and the book it’s based on) is about the darkness within man, he can’t comprehend that the war is just going to continue.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Cercas’ novel has a title that sounds like the opposite of The Heart of Darkness. Just like Coppola built on Conrad, Cercas seems to borrow both from Coppola’s and others’ versions of a war when he writes his own Vietnam war novel. After all, as 40-something Europeans, neither Cercas nor his narrator can claim first-hand experiences of the war; much of it is inevitably going to be based on the way the war has since been portrayed. So when the young Spanish exchange student befriends a war veteran 20 years his senior and tries to understand what happened to him, it makes perfect sense that the veteran in question comes across a bit like Christopher Walken’s character in Deer Hunter, if he’d made it back home and started studying literature – both the writer, the reader and the fictional narrator are seeing reality through a fictional lens.

But this is also where Cercas takes a sharp turn. Because as interesting as the traumatised old soldier might be, it’s obviously a story we’ve seen told before – but it’s only half the story in The Speed of Light. The other half concerns the narrator himself, many years later; he’s grown up as a modern European, and after his time in the US he returns home to Spain, far from wars, starvation and pointless massacres... and yet full of things that can go wrong, things you lie awake at night in horror of. Because just like Heart of Darkness isn’t only about colonial Africa, this isn’t about any specific war, but what happens to people who lose the war with themselves – who end up in a situation where they discover how easy it can be to step across that line. How evil is not necessarily something that comes with flashing lights, official declarations of war, bullets or Wagner at top volume, how the same darkness can turn up in the choices and simple acts we make from day to day. Our young Spaniard grows up, becomes a successful writer, and loses his grip completely; the comfortable life with its clearly stated goals of money, family and safety turns out to open up into an abyss, and we all know the quote about what happens if you look into that abyss... and so after losing everything, he returns to the US to try and find out what happened to the old veteran he knew 20 years earlier, and how to cope with the failure of a dream.

Cercas doesn’t exactly make it easy for himself. Having the same nameless narrator tell everything in flashbacks, with very little dialogue, could be a complete disaster for a less talented writer. But Cercas’ language is so straight-forward and alive that the book never loses its way. The two main characters’ lives and their thoughts on literature, war, fame and the difference between surviving and living is rarely less than fascinating (despite the fact that the theme of the book is based on a misquote of Bob Dylan...), occasionally disturbing, and often quite touching.

They say the speed of light is 300,000 m/s. When you look out in the world, it often seems to move a lot slower than that – it certainly doesn’t seem to be able to banish darkness forever. But we keep chasing it, and while there's no guarantee of catching it, occasionally we see a glimpse. Like this book, for instance.