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Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel weaves a compelling tale of homecoming, guilt, and loss, all set against the surreal backdrop of a mass zoo escape.
Saba is only a young child when he flees the Georgian civil war in the 1990s. Accompanied only by his father and older brother, he makes a home in the UK as a refugee, slowly cutting off his memories of Georgia and the rest of his family, all of whom were left behind to die in the conflict. It isn’t until almost 20 years later that Saba is forced to face a return to his homeland when first his father and then his brother go missing after themselves making this same return trip.
Upon his arrival to Tbilisi, Saba finds the city recently flooded, and several of the surviving animals — including Boris the Hippopotamus, several hyenas, and a man-eating tiger — running rampant through the city streets (based on the true events of the 2015 Tbilisi flood). He also learns that the police are looking for his relatives, and that his family is in much bigger trouble than he ever thought possible.
What began as a simple rescue mission becomes a convoluted treasure hunt, full of literary references acting as breadcrumbs, taking both Saba and the reader on a journey between past and present. Classic literature as well as Georgian proverbs are intertwined throughout Saba’s journeys, acting as a touchstone for Saba as an emigrant returnee straddling two historical contexts — it is also likely familiar to the author, Vardiashvili, who himself left Georgia as a child for the UK, eventually studying English literature in London.
Accompanying Saba on his odyssey are a cacophony of voices, each tied to a figure from his past — there is the malicious Nino, Saba’s closest childhood friend; the steadying Lena, his grandmother; the guiding Anzor, his uncle; and of course, the voice most silenced, Eka, his mother, who was left behind when the family fled to the UK.
Throughout the novel, these voices guide Saba, encouraging him, pushing him to and fro, acting as an outlet by which to process his memories and deal with whatever new roadblock emerges.
‘This city’s littered with memories that await me like land mines. Just enough time has passed to make everything just foreign enough. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. Then there’s the biblical flooding, runaway zoo animals, civic disarray, confiscated passports, missing brothers and fathers. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn’t even bring toothpaste.’
In flesh and blood is Nodar, a taxi driver from South Ossetia who takes Saba under his wing, becoming his companion through all of Saba’s travails. He acts as a guide to the new Georgia of 2010 that Saba has no conception of, a country where police operate in stations built of glass yet still follow the repressive tendencies of the Soviet past, and where blood feuds still carry on through the generations.
Throughout the novel, Saba and Nodar explore Tbilisi, building the city in a form recognisable to locals as well as introducing it to those unfamiliar. The pair also travel to the Georgian highlands via Mestia and to South Ossetia, layering Georgian history onto the modern country.
It is Nodar’s story, which becomes intertwined with Saba’s, that becomes the heart of the novel — Nodar and his wife have been able to build a life of sorts in Tbilisi, but their lack of knowledge regarding their young daughter, left behind in South Ossetia, threatens the couple’s relationship daily. The climax of the novel — the trip to South Ossetia — turns everything on its head, when Saba and Nodar attempt to hunt down their loved ones and find a way to survive the loss of what was.
Though often humourous — such as the constant encounters with random zoo animals — Hard by a Great Forest is in many ways a tragedy. No one’s memories are ever really the truth — and reality always has a way of making itself known.
The Georgia Saba finds is not the one he left as a child, for better or worse. But, there is also always hope. The past is just that — the past. By the end of the novel, Saba realises that it is time to grow up and find a new way forward, without the voices from his memories holding him back.
Book details: Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili, 2024, Bloomsbury.
