Book of the month: 4 stars

In Aleksandar Hemon’s continent-spanning new novel, Alan Bett finds a sprawling tale of war, revolution and migration that doesn’t lose sight of the intimately human story at its heart

In crime fiction, it’s been said that it doesn’t much matter who did it and why, only where the story is set. Solving the crime is simply a vehicle to travel through territory. While not of that genre, Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon’s new work is all about taking us to places. It opens with a map titled ‘the world’ and heads each section with a date and location: Galicia, 1916; Taklamakan Desert, 1926; Shanghai, 1932. But that opening maxim only holds partly true here; this is a work that gives equal weight to the intimately human, alongside the grand scenes from history played out in these times and locations.

It begins in Sarajevo, 1914. Pinto is a Jewish pharmacist with a taste for his own wares, but also of indulging romantic fantasies to feed the desires he must keep hidden. He is witness to the spark that sets the world aflame, when the assassination of a ‘somebody’ means that millions of ‘nothings and nobodies’ will follow him into death. Pinto is fed into the war machine, soon to meet the love of his life, Osman, a Bosnian Muslim. Theirs is a love hidden in plain sight as these two men hold each other tight in the trenches, caressing and kissing when the lights go down.

Their conflicting cultures go beyond performing a perfunctory metaphor, demonstrating that love endures across boundaries. Likewise, a relevance to contemporary issues such as forced migration and political turmoil rests on there being empathy at the centre of this work, rather than the fingerprints of performative literary technique, something that would feel largely redundant in the face of such human tragedy.

Hemon paints this calamity like a living, moving fresco with a cast of thousands, whether it’s a caravan of refugees trekking across a pitiless desert, or stateless masses bursting Shanghai at the seams in the 1930s. Pinto self-medicates through the horror of it all (laudanum, morphine, opium) as he continues his long walk across countries and borders. Even when remaining still, the wave of history washes borders over him. And like waves, there is a pattern: a war is followed by a war, a revolution by a revolution.

Much is familiar. When using love as the driver of an epic journey, Pasternak long beats Hemon to the punch, while Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man was an insignificant witness to moments of historical significance more than 40 years before Pinto appeared on the page. But there is a fresh and contemporary feel to this telling. This is partly the book’s kinetic nature and a postmodern cynicism, shaking the dust off more traditional norms of historical fiction. This narrative velocity is also, in part, a challenge. When considering historical context, Hemon never slows to allow an appreciation of the backdrop.

The novel also plays with language, stitching Uyghur, Bosnian and German into a self-designed Nadsat, with no concession given. The nonpolyglot must simply revel in the look and feel of unfamiliar vocabulary. In a meta epilogue, the author himself muses on his right to tell such a story: ‘you can experience and understand history only when you’re inside it’. The patiently painted characters and empathy at the core of this work allows others at least to imagine.

The World And All That It Holds is published by Picador on Thursday 2 February.