A Magician

A man not like other men

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell

I have fought valiant and long battles, over several years, to try to get members of my family to read this novella. With some success. Not complete success. With some success. And those who have read it, I regret to say, they have reported mixed things. This is my next go, my next big attempt. And here it is: you must read this book. I say you must read this book. I believe I have prepared the ground accordingly.

Well, you ask me (as ask me you shall), why? Why must I read this thing, this French thing, this thing from a little time ago which is a little pompous and foreign and announces itself to be important? I’ve listened to your film recommendations (if you are a member of my family), and I have been left unimpressed and wanting. Why should I listen to you this time?

The tautological answer leaps from the scabbard: because I am right. You ought to listen because I am right. But I’ll pretend that’s not true and address this on other terms. Might you want, once in your life, to read some really imaginative historical fiction? To see inside the mind of an admittedly elaborately fictional genius? I won’t say which one just for a moment. But think about it: to see inside the mind of a genius. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

Put a pin in that one, wrap the red string around it on the cork board and let’s move on. Istanbul – Constantinopolis, if want. What a place. What a grand monument made by man for himself. The sights, the variety – the great distance in time and, depending on where you are reading this from, in geography. You might play an Assassin’s Creed game to visit Istanbul of the old days. Or you might, more profitably for your mind and your conscience, read a book like this: a truly transporting book like this. I’d recommend the latter, but of course I would. We always knew (didn’t we, folks?), that I’d say exactly that

Briefly, then, because this is a slender book, it’s now time to drop the veil and talk about the protagonist: it’s Michelangelo. Lucky you, lucky reader, it’s Michelangelo. And not in one of those tedious renderings that you sometimes get in the novels by arts graduates who are looking for a little borrowed lustre. It’s Michelangelo real and vivid; and he’s making a trip – fictional – to Istanbul to work on a great project of the sultan’s: a bridge across the famous Golden Horn, the water that separates the two halves of this divided city. Only such a genius as Michelangelo could be depended upon to complete such a work. Only so fine an artist as he could give it what it required: great dignity and immensity, a legacy for its creator and its commissioner. Defiance of time, of god, of man.

So quit, Michelangelo, in a fit of pique your making of the tomb of Pope Julius! Come to the place where there are commissions for men like you – where there are poets who equal you in their art as you rival them in theirs. Where there are sights most unexpected, sensations strange and delirious, where there are people of types and kinds you cannot have anticipated, cannot ever have seen before.

I’ll throw some adjectives your way for a moment, as if to make my point further: beautiful, elegant, dreamy – those are all fine words, aren’t they? So think, think for a moment, of the work which might justly be described by all of them. Where the beauty of a dancing girl might presage a crisis in relations between an artist and a potentate. Where a place so immense, so alien, is the setting for an artistic question which is almost Promethean. Can I build such a thing? Dare I build such a thing?

For those who like art and who like questions of why, precisely, some people make things and why they are not always happy doing so, this book is the cat’s meow. For people who don’t, for whom glory does not hold sway, people who are not slaves to beauty, all I can say is ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s possible this one is not for you.