2023-04-11 13:07:43
It’s a brilliant idea to let an older, seasoned journalist go along on a rescue ship with ‘refugees’, picked up from the sea. They are mainly young men in colorful life jackets who have been sent out to sea in a dinghy following paying a few thousand euros to an intermediary. As far as the refugees know, they will be dropped on Lampedusa, Sicily or Malta and will find their own way there. This is the situation in which the journalist Tom Willems (pseudonym for Tomasz Wilenski) finds himself in the novel The bastard by Marente de Moor. Willem’s former editor-in-chief and former friend Hans has asked him to make one more strong report as he used to do from an impossible fire or conflict area, interspersed with impertinent questions to dubious leaders. It is remarkable that Hans knows very well that Tom, unlike himself, is very skeptical regarding the ‘refugee problem’. Hans himself is sympathetic to it. He can even imagine ‘climate refugees’. Tom’s skepticism means that he is not at all convinced that it is really refugees who are on such a ship. He has little understanding for economic refugees. According to Hans, he has made a ‘turn to the right’ in recent years. He shares a cabin with a sympathetic Senegalese who throws his brand new, shiny gold passport overboard so that he is now an undocumented man. What Tom’s friend Hans wants to achieve by sending him to the rescue ship is unclear. Perhaps he misjudged it and hoped that face to face with the desperate, Tom would soften his mind. But Tom is only confirmed in his skepticism that this is regarding human trafficking. He gradually finds out that the female crew of the nameless ship, the captain, the doctor, some helpers and a male jack of all trades are part of that trade. The refugees are juggling nationalities, one day they come from Pakistan, the next day from Syria. The passengers say, jokingly or not, that they need a dead or a sick person on board. Then the coastguard has to leave the boat in the harbor. Tom says slightly cynically to his cabin mate that it is enough for the emigration service that he act pathetic. ‘Can you?’
Evacuees
What Marente de Moor intends with the novel is also not too clear. What is certain is that she succeeds well in sketching Tom’s impossible position on the ship. He soon feels trapped. It is not said, but he is hated. He’s a jammer, a spy, someone who’s going to tell the truth in the newspaper. That the loitering and increasingly moody “refugees” are euphemistically called “evacuees” by the captain. Captain Lady Aga’s motto is: “It’s not who we save, it’s that we save them.”
Even if the ideas go in The bastard not deeply, De Moor nevertheless allows those ideas to cut into the lives of the characters.
The ‘evacuees’ are only waiting for the moment they can disembark. That moment never comes, they don’t want a port, but they don’t get to hear that. This leads to moaning, riots and fights. A refugee suddenly turns out to be a staff member who does not call himself a human trafficker, but a ‘ferryman’. When this ferryman rapes the female doctor in front of Tom, it must be kept quiet regarding it to the captain. Sulking regarding his position on the boat, Tom’s life also comes to the surface. He often thinks of his father, his mother, his ex-wife and his many-tattooed daughter Lau. He finds him ‘no longer of this time’. His father once fled from Poland and still has a daily aversion to communism. According to his ex-wife, he passes this on to his son Tom, which amounts to ‘right-wing ideas’. He also lacks criticism of capitalism. Tom himself thinks he just thinks soberly, is someone who attaches importance to the nuances, and has doubts regarding many things in advance. According to his mother, his father is ‘a bastard’, and Hans (who likes to bend with the zeitgeist to keep his position) thinks Tom is a right-wing bastard. Tom wonders if he thinks the way he does because he’s getting old, or because he’s sharp and up to date. Tom doesn’t like that the newspapers are now full of opinions and that the good old reportage is no longer there. Even if the ideas go in The bastard not deeply, De Moor nevertheless allows those ideas to cut into the lives of the characters. Tom hates opportunists and hypocrites, many of which he encounters when talking regarding ‘refugees’. He doesn’t think we’re guilty just because we’re ‘white’. According to his left-wing mother, who (he says) is willing to burn her own children at the stake for her ideals, he is an Islamophobe. He hates anything that is in improvement mode these days. Everything should have something healthy, good, nice, educational or connecting.
Anyone who does not doubt is a liar according to Tom.
Tom has the curious hobby of delving into saints’ lives according to the The Golden Legend (1259-1273), like that of the martyrs Agatha and Lucia. One has their breasts cut off (as seen in many paintings, such as Zurbarán’s on the cover of The bastard), the eyes of the other are gouged out. In the wake of these horrible tortures, Tom is a horror movie lover and has an extra-great feeling for women’s breasts. All in all, that makes him a curious, all-round character, a lover of torture horrors and someone with exquisite feelings for breasts. How much confidence The bastard can be found, whoever does not doubt is a liar according to Tom. Captain Lady Aga hates Tom’s doubt.
in the deepest depths of the dream
The crew wants to get rid of Tom, and Tom wants to get off the boat. When he takes the plunge into the sea following much dubbing, the novel immediately changes character and transitions into hallucinatory, dreamlike imagination. It is as if De Moor no longer knew what to do with a ship that is not allowed to moor anywhere. As a result of his jump into the sea, Tom floats on an inflated pony, sees Kate Bush provide a musical atmosphere and a water goddess performs a ballet with her divine breasts. The novel goes out like a candle through this dreamlike ending. It offers too few clues to the rest of the novel, unless they lie in the deepest depths of the dream. What remains is the many tantalizing deliberations of Tom’s both bold and nuanced thoughts, caught in the claustrophobic situation of a boat on its way to nothing.
The bastard by Marente de Moor is published by Querido.
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