Violence

Sparta  -  Roxana Robinson (2013)

 

 

Violence is a part of every society. Usually it remains hidden but it's never that far away from the surface of things. When it happens it happens as crime or illness; it happens, too by official design in the forms of punishment and war. Of course there are more or less violent societies; Norway is a a more peaceful country than Iraq, but does this mean that Scandinavians are less violent than Arabs? Surely not; human beings seem to be born with the same stuff in their heads and bodies the world over. The potential for violence is universal but its activation is not.

Roxana Robinson's novel Sparta is about the violence of contemporary America. On any measure the US is a violent country. According to the UN the US has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and the 28^th highest rate of homicides by firearm per capita. Historically, the United States has spent 218 of the 239 years of its existence at war. If an alien species were to land in the US tomorrow they would be very foolish little green men indeed to turn up un-armed (untentacled?).

So, then, Roxanna Robinson's novel, Sparta. The novel tells the story of Conrad Farrell, a US Marine who, on his return from the war in Iraq to civilian life struggles to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Robinson's choice of title makes explicit the inherently violent nature of the America. Conrad is a student of the classical civilisation who appalls his family and girlfriend by choosing to join the military. His reasoning is based on his study of ancient Greece and Rome. For Conrad, as for the ancients, war was an inherently good activity:

“Conrad talked about Homer. War was his great subject, how it shaped history, affected families, changed young men. War was the route to nobility”.  Indeed, Conrad writes his thesis on the social conventions and culture of ancient Sparta: “The business of Sparta was war and all else was subjugated to that”.  On the basis of these insights, Conrad joins the Marines. He serves two tours of duty in Iraq, witnesses and carries out horrific, obscene acts of violence and when he eventually returns to the US he is catastrophically marked by what has happened to him. 

Surely, relentlessly, Conrad's life starts to implode.

Abbreviations abbreviate. Robinson's novel – itself a story about anger – seems to have been written in outrage about this fact. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD. An abbreviation that she almost completely avoids using. Towards the end of the novel she has a military doctor use the term but she does so in order to mark this official out as part of the problem, part of the silencing and abbreviation of this illness.

Over the course of the novel Conrad's mental state deteriorates and one by one his relationships fall to pieces. He cannot cope with civilian life. As he walks the streets, sits in a restaurant or drives a car he is constantly on edge. At all times he is a heartbeat away from a state of terrible rage that, in Iraq, would have kept him alive, but back in the US cripples his thoughts and emotions.

There's something hypnotic about the way that Robinson tells the story of what's going on inside Conrad's head. She swoops again and again to sketch aspects of the character, amplifying a previously described thought or emotion or illuminating some previously hidden aspect of the illness.

The episodes themselves seem relatively minor. He has a moment of road rage where he tries to out manoeuver another vehicle that reminds him of being on the road in Iraq. He almost gets into a fist fight with a man on a beach. He reacts with reflexive aggression to being bumped into on the street. He stares intimidatingly at another commuter on a train. He argues with his sister and her boyfriend, his girlfriend, brother, parents and so on. Yet the aggregate effect is of a deeply troubled person, and gradually, inevitably his thoughts become more and more suicidal.

There is a sense, too, of the narrative itself being drawn down into the terminal vortex of Conrad's illness. His obsessive thoughts, his compulsive behaviours, the constant torment of being on an adrenaline saturated state of alert, the insomnia and growing isolation and alcoholism, all seem to create a kind of momentum that draws the story towards an obvious conclusion. Robinson's description of this movement is so vivid that she reveals a kind of seduction that can easily be understood as operating at a fictional and an existential plane. If suicide seems like the obvious way to finish this novel, then can anyone doubt that suicide would be just as appealing a way out in real life?

On the terms set by this novel, Conrad's military training may have kept him alive in Iraq but it is very nearly the death of him on his return to civilian life. He cannot ask for help; to do so would be a dangerous weakness. He describes this bind to his parents as follows:

"The whole Marine ethic is that you're tough. You can take anything. You don't ask for emotional help. That's the one place you're on your own...Marines can't say they're in trouble. Not if they still think of themselves as Marines" 

Towards the end of the novel, one of the men from his platoon, Anderson, shoots himself in the head and Conrad seems destined to follow suit.

Robinson manages to arrest the seemingly inevitable but right up until the last page this outcome was very much unclear. She manages to convey a  sense of crisis that is both personal and general, and also, convincing. Conrad could so easily have killed himself - he was a hair's breadth from doing so and the reader is left with the conviction that others have and will do so.

This is a political novel but its great strength - the characterisation of Conrad - means that it never becomes sententious. Robinson concludes with noting that:

"Sparta failed, in the end, because the energies of the state were directed only toward war. Robbed of its young men, the country became hollowed out from within, and what remained was a hard, burnished carapace"

The message for the Unites States is clear enough here.

Sparta may be a novel directed at a contemporary American audience but its observations about violence and the crisis of masculinity are relevant in Ireland too. 

In this country, men are violent towards women, other men and themselves. Far more men than women are domestic abusers. The overwhelming majority of violent crimes in Ireland are committed by men.  Eight out of every ten suicides are by men. 

This novel is not going to solve these problems but its mapping out of what it is like to be a man, what it is like to be taught to act violently, shows how narrow, how cruel and inadequate such lessons are.