Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Siege’ is a satire on life in Hoxha’s Stalinist Albania with show trials and pseudoscience getting in the way of what the state, in the shape of the Ottoman army, is supposed to be doing. But one of the reasons that he story matters is that there are real historical issues at stake as well as contemporary ones.
The wars with Turkey, wars that the Balkans were inevitably going to lose, were a crucible in which national identity was melted and reforged. The gallant defenders of a nameless fortress may survive this time, but in the end the Ottomans will take them as they have taken everyother fortress, will soon – it is the middle of the fifteenth century – takeByzantium itself for their capital, Constantinople. Kadare’s use of historical irony and his satiric purpose reflect back into each other;
history is a process in which, in the end, everyone loses.
Structurally, the book alternates the collective hopes and fears of the defenders, who are never seen as individuals, with the fates and arguments of a variety of Turkish specialists, many of whom prosper and many of whom die. The engineer builds his cannon but loses his beloved assistant to vengeful spite; astrologers come and go and are replaced and die chained in work gangs; a poet seeks the fulfilment of his vocation and perhaps finds it in blindness. The Pasha commanding the army knows that he will never be forgiven for failure and is accordingly merciless in his expenditure of lives.
This is an impressively decorative novel in which war is at once horrible and beautiful, in which we see vividly the smashing of bodies to pulp and shattered bone and the waving of a thousand jewel-embroidered banners. The ironies that surround its composition – that it meant one thing to the authoritarian nationalist official audience for whom it was first written and quite another, in its
mildly rewritten form, for the international liberal audience which reads it now – are part of that double vision, part of its point.
