Characters in Requiem need genuine forgiveness, and they desperately need to genuinely forgive. They might approach that impossible goal, then be thwarted by some contingency. Death, for example – another salient theme of this novel, confronted by each of its major characters.
Many characters are familiar enough. We know people like the main narrator, and probably think we’d act as he does. We never learn his name or his line of work, but are at ease in his interior, behind his eyes. Here is a reflective and always helpful soul who elicits sympathy and understanding, going about his good deeds for the tortured and troubled protagonists.
We get the most clearly etched depictions of Milan Šoštarić. Milan arrived as a child migrant in Melbourne, with his honest hard-working parents. We learn much that is true to life in the Croatian diaspora through episodes that he recounts to the narrator – or when the speaker’s staff is handed temporarily to Milan himself, or to a reminiscing friend. Milan’s encounters with women loom especially large and threatening with Bella Nemeth as his archetypal nemesis.
First among the protagonists is Bella herself. A polymorphous transgressor if ever there was one, Bella operates at times as a smuggler. At other times she is an interpreter for UN forces in war-ravaged Yugoslavia – another kind of bordercrossing, to add to her breaches of sexual, relationship, political, and social norms. Acting as an interpreter (and sometimes a translator), Bella conveys the perceptions and concerns of other people; but she never takes on the role of narrator for us.
War is omnipresent for Bella – literally, but also in her harrowing home life as a girl in Zagreb and a young woman in Altona, a Melbourne suburb. Yugoslavia’s fragmentation in the dark aftermath of Tito is the story of a parallel dysfunctional family – of not-yet-nation states, complete with unthinkable atrocities (reader, be ready for those in little Bella’s life also) and poisonously paternalistic leaders.
