Photographs do not lie. Unlike human memories which are recorded only after being filtered through an individual's biases and prejudices, photographs are snapshots of perfectly preserved truth, immune from the vicissitudes of time's corrosive power. They remember events as they were. They can never forget. And it is these truths which empower the guilt, fear and nihilism in The Painter of Battles.
Driven halfway to madness by a career in war photography, decades exposed to the spiritual taint of merciless barbarity, Andres Faulques has withdrawn to a lonely watchtower to begin his masterpiece, a grand and unflinching collage of war. The watchtower's interior walls are the canvas for his painting, a series of graphic scenes drawn from atrocities he's witnessed from across countless conflicts. His sea-side sanctuary is only troubled by the occasional boatload of tourists passing by, that is until a man he's never met steps out of his past. Markovic was a young soldier captured in one of Faulques' photographs. But while the snapshot is but one of many that earned Faulques money and fame from the ghoulish West, it destroyed Markovic's life. And now he has come to exact his revenge upon the painter of battles.
Mr. Reverte's unforgiving tale is a 230 page reconstruction of the lives of two men and the instant of time that binds them together. Though Markovic intends to avenge himself on Faulques for the photograph Faulques took of him as a soldier during the Bosnian war, Markovic is unwilling to execute his mission until he, a relatively uneducated man, has puzzled out the enigmatic Faulques. For after years spent tracking Faulques down, imagining their confrontation, it's clear Markovic expected Faulques to be a spoiled and thoughtless Westerner. Instead, he finds an emotionally exhausted chronicler of human suffering, a man compelled to memorialize all that he has seen and all that man has done. In this, Markovic inadvertently becomes Faulques' historiographer, the extractor of Faulques' past, particularly the years he spent with his lover, Olvido, a fellow war photographer. And this is how Markovic comes to find that, in his own way, Faulques has sounded out depths of depravity that not even broken Markovic has had the misfortune to explore.
For such a slim novel, there is a great deal here to digest. Mr. Reverte's prose is beautifully masculine, as foreboding as it is succinct. But while he is a writer of the first-class, his pessimism concerning the nature of man is a stain on his piece. Forget heroes; in Mr. Reverte's world, there aren't even good guys, merely men distinguished by varying shades of darkness. It does not matter if you are an uneducated soldier locked into atrocities not of your own choosing (Markovic), or a highly educated, artistic elite driven by a need to capture the soul of ugly humanity (Faulques); all are susceptible to violence, to cruelty, to brutality. It doesn't matter if you hold a gun or a camera, if you rape or witness rape; it is in you, this dark capacity which whispers to be set free. This is guilty nonsense.
Mr. Reverte appears to believe that war zones are reflective of man's true nature, that it is here where man reveals his depravity. But of course man does not have a single, definitive nature. Man is fundamentally a mimic. If all about him is chaos and cruelty, then he shall be chaotic and cruel. If all about him is order and peace, then he shall be orderly and peaceful. There are always exceptions, on either side of the coin, but these are safe generalizations. We have a desire to conform to what we see about us. Mr. Reverte has taken a snapshot of man at his worst and transposed that upon man as a whole. This is a disservice to all of the billions who live without committing the crimes that Faulques and Markovic have committed. These are men who have stayed too long under the glare of cruel suns and now they know not how to sooth their burns.
This is a compelling read, but its violence is relentless. What's more, Mr. Reverte's obsession with rape is off-putting. A book that is fundamentally about atrocities must include this most cruel act, but not to this extent. Gripping, but its distorted view of man fails to convince. (3/5 Stars)
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