The Spectator
August 30, 2008
Will he, won’t He?;
BOOKS
by Alexander Waugh
ARARAT by Frank Westerman, translated by Sam Garrett Harvill Secker,
£16.99, pp. 229 ISBN 97881846550898 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429
6655
Who was Noah? The Bible tells us little. He was the flood hero of
course, but what else?
A drunken viniculturist who lived to the age of 950; who was 600 at
the time of the flood and 500 when he fathered Shem, Ham and
Japheth. His wrinkled bottom was ogled by his 100-year-old sons when
he passed out from drunkeness in his tent one night. But was he not
also an ‘upright man’ and a man who ‘walked with God’?
Each year hundreds of pilgrims, known as ‘Arkeologists’ make their way
to Mount Ararat (where the Turkish, Armenian and Iranian borders meet)
hoping to find clues and relics. Some return home with splints of
wood, others only with soft memories of mystic vision. Arkeologists
are simple folk, of whom the late Apollo astronaut, James Irwin, was
one. They ignore the fact that in Genesis, Noah’s ship came to rest
‘in the mountains of Ararat’, which is not the same as ‘on Mount
Ararat’. Never mind, they say, and never mind that the modern ‘Mount
Ararat’ is situated outside the old Kingdom of Ararat and is not
therefore among the ‘Mountains of Ararat’. Why should Arkeologists
care if their mountain only got its name from Marco Polo in the 13th
century? The Turks always called it Agri Dagi (Mountain of Pain), the
Armenians, Masis (Mother Mountain), and the Kurds, Ciyaye Agiri (Fiery
Mountain).
If you start with an unbudgeable faith in Ararat you don’t give a fig
that the Qu’ran claims that the Ark came to rest on al-Judi, a
mountain miles to the south; that the 2nd-century BC Book of Jubilees
says it was Mount Lubar, that Nicholas of Damascus says it was an
Armenian peak called Baris.
In the Babylonian account, the oldest extant Deluge story, from which
the Genesis authors undoubtedly snitched their plot, the Ark lands on
the top of Mount Nizir.
Enter Frank Westerman, a clever, talented 43-year-old Dutchman of
Puritan stock. His grandfather and mother were Creationists. He was
baptised and, brought up in rigid Protestant faith, ‘permeated with
Christianity’, but from his early twenties he ceased to pray. At
university he studied tropical agriculture, then he became a
journalist, reporting from war-torn Bosnia and later from Moscow. His
books have won important literary prizes. He first saw Ararat, the
great mountain-volcano, from the Soviet side. It seemed to pull
him. ‘I wanted, ‘ he says, ‘to test my resolve as a non-believer
… to see whether faith could touch me or not.’ Soon he had forged a
plan: to climb to its summit and to write a book about ‘belief and
knowledge, religion and science, with Ararat as its focal point’.
So he decided to leave his young wife and daughter and to scale the
17,000-footer on his own. When Westerman outlined this scheme to his
publisher he was abruptly warned: ‘Promise me one thing: that halfway
through the manuscript you won’t start writing he with a capital H.’
‘And if I do?’ he asked. ‘Then I won’t publish it.’ God does appear as
a ‘Him’ halfway through, but his publisher either failed to notice or
decided that Westerman was far too good an author to reprimand. The
result of his labours is a short book of stupendous richness and
complexity, a cornucopia of jumbled facts about geology, history and
science, woven into a personal memoir and travelogue that combines
stories about the lives of his teachers with information about Dutch
mining, family sentiment, religious belief, academic rivalry,
portraits of fellow travellers, mountaineering history, politics,
personalities and an abundance of lesser, uncategorisable
side-detail. All this diverse material is held together by a thread of
tension as to whether Westerman will find faith halfway up the
mountain. When the air is thin, the climber exhausted, the cold starts
to bite and the sweeping views turn to an icy blur, will our hero and
guide suddenly behold the Arkeologists’ light? Will he start digging
for shards of the patriarch’s wine glasses under the rubble of the
Ahora Gorge, or fall prostrate before an outcrop of rock known as the
‘Ararat Anomaly’ that some believe to be the fossilised remains of the
Ark?
At timed intervals Westerman taunts his readers with this
possibility. If faith could come to the astronaut, he argues, maybe it
will also come to him. The book (a fine translation from the Dutch by
Sam Garrett) is unquestionably eccentric, but written with enough
knowledge, craft and competence to keep the drowsiest of readers wide
awake from first to last.
The answer to the author’s most pressing question is tucked neatly
behind a glancing metaphor right at the end.