Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals is the novel of the summer—which will outlast the season a long time. Well reviewed in the New York Times, and acclaimed by fellow novelist Lionel Shriver in the Washington Post as a “great book,” Beautiful Animals is the story of a great crime. It is an account of two young women, one British and one American, summering on a Greek island with their families. Spurred on by boredom, compassion, and greed, the two set out to help a Syrian refugee who has washed ashore. The consequences of their actions, and an apparent clash of the character of cultures, drive what is the most intellectually and morally compelling novel in recent years.
Beautiful Animals is Osborne’s fifth novel. A prolific journalist and nonfiction author, Osborne published his first novel Ania Malia in 1986 and returned to fiction with his 2012 novel The Forgiven. A critically acclaimed thriller and social novel set in Morocco, The Forgiven is now in production as a major motion picture.
Osborne is a friend of many years, dating back to when we both lived in New York. I interviewed him for THE WEEKLY STANDARD (here) last year after I’d finished reading his breathtakingly beautiful ghost story Ballad of a Small Player. We caught up again recently to discuss his new book, the refugee crisis in Europe, Asian cinema (he lives in Bangkok), Western civilization, Lebanese food, and Italian wine.
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Lee Smith: Beautiful Animals is a crime story. And you even have a great detective figure—the mysterious, and uxorious, Rockhold. Are there certain things that genre fiction gives a writer room for, room unavailable, say, in what is typically, and vaguely, classified as “literary fiction”?
Lawrence Osborne: Perhaps there is more leeway to use plot, an element much hated—or even feared—by literary writers. Generally, in any case, this is nearly always the element that will attract the most ready scorn in a reviewer. But of course, Beautiful Animals is in the end a literary not a genre novel and it will reviewed as such.
LS: Beautiful Animals is also a political novel—or a novel that touches on political issues, indeed some of the key issues of the day, immigration from the south (Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, etc.) to the north (the United States and Europe), and the relationship between Western and Middle Eastern societies. One of the characters in the novel says: “You have to wonder whether Europeans are just too stupid to survive now. We don’t seem to understand obvious things that are staring us in the face. . . . If we keep them out it destroys them; if we let them in it destroys us. Do we have the stomach for that dilemma?” What precisely is the dilemma and how do you see it turning out?
LO: The migrant crisis has evolved to become a near-permanent condition, thus rendering the idea of a temporary crisis obsolete. The vast movement of people away from sub-Saharan Africa towards Europe is not a challenge that Europeans are even thinking about at this point because the focus has been on Syria and the route through Turkey rather than the African exodus via Libya. That these are totally different exoduses should be obvious by now, and what principally unites them is the war in Libya and ISIS control of the Libyan ports. These are not the principal focus of my novel, of course, more the background to it. It is the characters who bring it up, not the narrator, and they do so often with an unwitting cluelessness: as with the Samantha’s father airily wondering about the connection between Odysseus in the Odyssey and contemporary migrants. Less diligent reviewers will naturally mistake this for my position, or the perspective of the novel’s—it is of course just satire.
LS: The refugee, Faoud, is an interesting and pretty sympathetic character—well educated, fluent in English and French as well as Arabic, he was a music student before he was forced to flee Aleppo. And he commits a terrible crime. What you seem to be getting at here isn’t about a clash of civilizations but rather, as in all literature, how character, individual and collective, drives fate. Does his crime suggest that the character of Western and Middle Eastern societies are in some way incompatible?
LO: No, not necessarily. Circumstances—or fate, to use the more somber Greek alternative—create a person’s chain of actions. Being stateless and deprived of protection will change one’s behavior profoundly—as Europeans themselves discovered during their own relatively recent wars. It’s more a question of how each culture sees the other—and there it’s a complex mixture of distrust, admiration, contempt, envy, self-doubt, paranoia, attraction, sexual fantasy and aggression. On both sides, it hardly needs to be iterated, and over many centuries.
LS: Much of the novel is set in Greece, typically identified as the birthplace of Western civilization. And yet as you write in the book, in some ways Greece, especially its landscape, hasn’t changed much in 3,000 years. In some ways, since Greece is part of the Levant it’s closer to Syria than it is to London or New York, where the other main characters hail from. So, does it make sense for us to talk about the West, or Western civilization? Or are there better ways to identify what distinguishes certain societies, similarities and differences?
LO: No, I believe there is a Western identity, and the proof of that is that Greeks themselves believe in it very strongly and very adamantly. Their history within the Ottoman Empire proved that ultimately, because it set the terms for their rather curious war of independence in the 1830’s, where Egyptian mercenary armies employed by the Ottoman state dueled not only with Greeks but with British and French navies. Besides, it would be a spectacular revisionism—and a dire ignorance—to lift Athens out of the Western sense of self!
Instead, we should see the West as a historical civilization that is spread over large areas and over large arcs of time in the course of which its centers of power have shifted constantly. Having lived in both Greece and Turkey, I am sure there is a line there somewhere because ultimately Islamic societies live and breathe according to a different conception of the citizen.
LS: In a sense the novel is about outsiders. At the center of the story is an Arab refugee who washes up on a European beach, but the two young women protagonists, a Brit and an American, are also outsiders on the island. The European woman has been coming to Greece her whole life and can speak the language, but the natives still have a strong sense that she’s not one of them. Insofar as you’ve lived abroad quite often—and you are now—what is it about the figure of the outsider that appeals to you, for yourself and as a writer? Does it make you more observant of your surroundings? Does it make for more interesting literary characters?
LO: I think it must make for intriguing characters—but of course it also begs the question as to what an insider is. Was I an insider living in New York for so many years? No. Was I an outsider by virtue of being a native English speaker who was educated in America? No. As a romantic conceit, of course, the alienated native in his own land is the most anguished outsider of all—you might call it the Kleist factor. As for Greeks—or any nation for that matter—the keen sense of tribe and language changes according to who the outsider is. So, a well-off Britisher is an outsider on the ethnic and linguistic level, but he will be regarded as a fellow European on another level. In my opinion, this sense among Europeans is very strong, just as it is among Muslims or North Africans. It’s a common human way of securing a niche in a hostile universe.
LS: The actions of the two main female characters turn on a number of significant human emotions and moods, including anger, resentment, pity, and charity. The two young women are also moved by boredom. The Syrian is moved by greed and fear of violent death. Are the great spurs to human action usually the basest moods and emotions? Where does heroism come from?
LO: But anger is not necessarily base, and nor is pity of course. Boredom, though, is a powerful driver of human beings, and not just the Baudelaires of this world. Some of the Algerian migrants showing up in Italy have said, when asked why they came, “We were bored in Algeria.” No sex, no fun, no freedom. It sounds banal, until you are yourself deprived of those things. But of course we are extremely reluctant to admit such things as motives for risking one’s life—but people do that all the time. It’s like the underground jazz enthusiasts in Nazi Germany. Boredom and sexual desire are a potent and explosive combination, and people will certainly risk their lives to exit a grey and boring life.
I spent a fair amount of time in Communist Poland when I was young—my wife was from there—and I had the impression that boredom was one of the things that was undermining that whole society from the inside. As for heroism, it might also proceed from a profound dissatisfaction—in some cases.
LS: I remember we were out one night in Brooklyn and you said how if you opened a school you’d teach two subjects, the history of technology and military history. Why those two subjects? And are you still thinking about opening a school?
LO: I’d love to open a school, but I’m too amateurishly ignorant to actually pull it off. Military history is essential to understanding any history, and moreover is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature—for yes, to me such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it. And the history of technology—including medicine—might be a way to de-ideologize an understanding of the past. Think of Joseph Needham’s great study of China, The Great Titration. It’s a book I loved when I was younger.
LS: You’re part of the production team for a movie version of your novel, The Forgiven. What are the chances of you getting hooked on movies and turning your attention to writing screenplays? Or, in spite of the problems with the literature industry, are you totally hooked on the novel?
LO: I love the novel as a form, as an adventure of mind and soul. Really, I absolutely love writing them, they consume my days and nights—what can I say? But I am an avid film student, too; I watch a movie every night. With John Michael McDonagh, the writer and director on The Forgiven, I have thoroughly enjoyed our exchanges about film lore and history and our comparing of notes about films that most people haven’t seen—he is as big a fan of Korean cinema as I am, for example.
It is interesting, too, to think about actors and how they work in these films. For myself, I am much influenced by contemporary Asian film and its ways of imagining narratives. To me, it feels fresher, more sophisticated, more transgressively dangerous than our own stuff. Our movies are in decline now. I’ve taken more from great directors in this part of the world than I do from the Anglo-American literary scene. To me, film is a way of telling stories that is deeply connected to the novel, whatever many novelists assert to the contrary. Can I think of a contemporary novel as brilliant as Memories of Murder, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, or In the Mood for Love? No.
LS: You have a nice scene toward the end of Beautiful Animals set in Illili, a Lebanese restaurant in Manhattan we both love, and they’re drinking a Chateau Musar, Lebanon’s most famous and maybe best wine. You have lots of nice wines in the book, which makes sense for a man who wrote a travelogue about alcohol, The Wet and the Dry, and you still write a lot about wine. What are the three best wines you’ve had recently and where did you drink them?
LO: Here in Bangkok a natural wine bar just opened and I’ve been able to drink Contadino, the wine made on Etna by Frank Cornelissen. Strange to drink it on the equator, but whatever! I bagged a bottle of Raveneau Chablis at the Shangri La in Hong Kong, a wine I was moved to find there since I had visited Raveneau back in the day and love their old-fashioned craftsmanship. And then, most recently, I scored a bottle of Jean Folliard Fleurie at the Bangkok restaurant Gaggan with my friend and dashing food writer Tom Downey from New York, an equally unexpected find. But Italy is where my wine heart is, and alas I find for that it has to be Italy herself or New York.
