[In the following review, Brownjohn regards The General of the Dead Army as a “profoundly moving novel” and notes that the narrative remains engaging, despite the ambiguousness of the lead characters.]

The Albanian novelist, poet and critic Ismail Kadare both enjoyed the cautious favour of the Hoxha regime as someone applauding the Marxist “modernization” of his country, and suffered from its humiliating disapproval; he was banned from publishing for three years, when he brought out a political satire in verse in 1975, and then attacked in 1981, when he “evaded politics” in one of his lighter fictions. Since 1990, he has been living in France. This, his first (and still most celebrated) novel, originally published here in 1971, returns to us now in the author's definitive final version of 1998, and by the same indirect route. With no literary translator from the Albanian then available, the 1971 English edition was translated from the French of Albin Michel by Derek Coltman, who this time round adds numerous small-scale authorial revisions incorporated in the 1998 French version. It all reads immaculately, suggesting meticulous and inspired effort by the two translators in rendering a spare, astringent and lucid prose style.

The General of the Dead Army manages to compel attention without encouraging empathy with any of its principal characters. As with almost everyone else, they are not named, remaining just “the general”, “the priest” (who accompanies him everywhere), “the Albanian expert”, “Colonel Z”. Apart from Tirana, and Kadare's mountain birthplace, the city of Gjirokastër, none of the locations is named. Whether in the mountains or on the plains, they are rendered similar and anonymous by the unvarying grimness of the Italian general's mission; he faces everywhere “the same black mud … the same stones, the same roots, the same vapour”; being charged with the task of recovering from this foreign, Albanian soil whether they were properly or haphazardly buried, the remains of all of his countrymen who died there during the Second World War. To assist him, he has only inadequate maps and lists of names with brief physical descriptions and dental records, for the exhumation of what amounts to a “kingdom of bones”.

Illusions of the nobility of the enterprise, compared by him to the solemnity of funeral rites in the world of Homer, give way to revulsion and fatigue with the repetitiousness of the work and the attitude of the Albanian labourers employed in the digging; they are old soldiers for whom “pulling old enemies back out of their graves” offers a satisfying extension of the war. Kadare avoids repetition in his storytelling by introducing harsh anecdotes from the war period itself. These underline the realities, horrible or merely grotesque, of the past which the general, his laconic priest and their workers unearth with the bones, and they vary what might otherwise be an unremittingly grim account. The author's mordant humour is telling, at the rare moments when he uses it.

The novel is rich in poignant details, which enable it, despite the remoteness of the region and the facelessness of the characters, to work on a wholly realistic as well as an allegorical level. This is Kadare's most remarkable achievement; the army is symbolic, but has inescapably been a real one, reduced now to a smallish cargo of phosphorus and calcium set for burial in thousands of miniature coffins. War is not only about slaughter during the conflict but also its pathetic and unresolved aftermath; before his journey, the general receives numberless requests from relatives of the dead petitioning him with sketch maps and pitiful entreaties to seek out and restore their loved ones' remains.

Exhausted by the seeming endlessness of the undertaking, the general surveys the rescued bones stowed in blue plastic bags and thinks of all the battles he himself (a “peace-time general”) could have won with them. The priest, who speaks a little of their language, categorizes the Albanians as “given to war by their very nature”. In a passage which has a dreadful resonance in the present, he reflects that, “deprived of war and weapons his people would just wither away. … It is fortunate for their neighbours that the Albanians number only a few million.” The judgment seems brutal, but Kadare allows his itinerant workmen and taciturn villagers, with their recurrent vendettas and violent folklore, to bear it out.

Two subplots embellish the main narrative. The general and priest encounter another team excavating graves with the same purpose. They are Germans on the same mission, making comparable collections of disinfected bones; the incident demonstrates the universality of the yearning to recover and rebury the dead. The second, more important strand, concerns Colonel Z, commander of the “Blue Battalion”, the infamous punitive force feared as much by its Italian comrades as by foreign enemies. The general is attracted to the colonel's widow, and suspects that she is having an affair with the priest. It is essential to recover Z's remains, but they seem untraceable. Kadare's unravelling of this mystery, in relating the general's ill-advised visit to a wild wedding feast, is wholly unexpected, and harrowing in its understatement. It provides an extraordinary conclusion to this profoundly moving novel, which recovers dignity from the banal and dirty horrors of war in chronicling the general's recovery of the bones from the ground.