Two fathers, two slain daughters – and the novel aims to inspire peace

FICTION
Apeirogon
Colum McCann
Bloomsbury, $29.99

An apeirogon is a member of the mathematical family that includes pentagon, hexagon, octagon, decagon – shapes with respectively five, six, eight, 10, sides. The apeirogon has a countably infinite number of sides and even if you never quite followed your mathematics teacher's explanation of countable infinity, that need not take from your delight in this book.

In a note at the end, the author describes it as "a hybrid novel with invention at its core … a work of storytelling", but it would be easy to imagine that academics might want to invent a new classification for it.

The book is the story of two men from widely different backgrounds. Rami Ehlanan, son of a Holocaust survivor, is a veteran of the Israeli army whose 14-year old daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber in the centre of Jerusalem. The second man is Bassam Aramin, who at 17 began a seven-year sentence as a Palestinian terrorist; 10 years after Smadar was killed, Bassam's daughter died from a plastic bullet fired by a young Israeli soldier.

Today the two grieving fathers travel the world together, preaching peace. The central section of the book, framed by black pages at each end, contains statements from each man, extracted from their own words in interviews and public lectures. What you read between those two black pages is not fiction. If I say that both refer frequently to The Occupation, it will give a feel for their views.

The remainder of the book is divided into a large number of what you might call chapters, some extending through several pages, some just one line, some no more than a black-and-white photograph or an empty rectangle, all numbered in sequence 1, 2, 3, ... The implication is that just as this story has a large, though countable, number of chapters, there is a large number of ways of looking at the complicated problems between Israelis and Palestinians.

Since the apeirogon is a closed geometrical shape, those problems will eventually come back to their start: 500, 498, 497, … 3, 2, 1. And even if we have only a childhood memory of Middle East stories, we will not be surprised to note that the total number of chapters is 1001.

This multi-sided narrative has room for Borges, Einstein, Gandhi, Freud, Martin Luther King, Sinéad O'Connor, US senators George Mitchell and John Kerry, and the tightrope walker Philippe Petit – who featured in McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin. There are explanations of the aeronautics behind the flight of birds and their epic migrations; we learn about the physics of plastic bullets, the chemistry of Semtex and the lethal effects of each; we read about Jewish traditions and Palestinian customs and meet many of the leaders in each culture in literature and the arts.

At one stage, Bassam moves with his family to Bradford in England to complete a masters thesis on the Holocaust. The family are kept for eight hours at Ben Gurion airport, missing several flights, while he is asked the same questions over and over; later we are reminded that he and his people have travelling documents but not passports.

In England, he is delighted with the absence of checkpoints, barricades, razor wire, steel towers, border guards, armed patrols and strip searches. His children are happy to be able to play in the park; he celebrates by walking around the city long into the night, alone or with his wife.

Colum McCann has a special talent for describing bleakness and despair. An earlier novel, This Side of Brightness, was set among the outcasts who populate the subway tunnels under New York city; his book Zoli was set among the Romani of Eastern Europe. He has the ability to make us feel sympathy for his characters, whatever their faults.

Here his most powerful writing is in those passages when he describes life in the West Bank and the occupied territories. The desolation and harshness of the landscape are mirrored in the all-pervading stagnation of societies fixated on doctrine and obsessed with controlling the lives of citizens, their own and others.

When you are finished, all you want is to find someone else who has read the book so that you can hear what she thought of it. And not just one person – a group of readers to whom the book may mean different things. Not because you want to court controversy or referee a shouting match, but because you want to hear each in turn explain quietly what the story means to him or her.

This is a different kind of book, and you suspect that McCann may have invented something quite new. Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 American Book Award for Fiction. Expect similar acclaim for Apeirogon.

Frank O'Shea is an editor of the online magazine tinteán.org.au