Black Butterflies (2023)

Why this one?

I had been checking out some books from the 2023 Women’s Prize Longlist, and am now reading through those that I haven’t covered that are on the Shortlist. This is one of the three remaining books I hadn’t read that I’ll aim to get through before the winner is announced in June.

Black Butterflies is by Priscilla Morris, born London, UK to parents of British and Bosnian heritage, spending many of her childhood summers in Sarajevo. Her mother moved to London the 1960s where she met and married her English father. Priscilla studied Spanish, Italian and Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, and later an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. After stints in Barcelona and Rio, she now lectures in Creative Writing at University College Dublin, diving her time between Ireland and Catalonia. This, her debut novel, was published in 2022 and as well as this year's Women's Prize it has been shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.

Thoughts, etc.

Black Butterflies focuses on the early part of the Bosnian War (1992-1995), a conflict between national factions that was a significant phase in the demise of the Former Yugoslavia following the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It is centred on Zora, a Bosnian Serb landscape painter and lecturer who lives with her husband Franjo in Sarajevo at the beginning of the war, and remains behind as the devastating Siege of Sarajevo commences, while Franjo takes her mother to the English countryside, where Zora’s daughter lives with her English husband and their child.

Zora expects the crisis to be over in a matter of weeks, but instead it escalates, and life as she knows it changes immeasurably. Routes in and out of the besieged city are soon closed, communication lines are down and electricity and water follow. Death is all around, the city under constant attack from long-range shelling and snipers. Despite all of this, she tries to maintain a semblance of normality, forging new and strengthened friendships with her immediate neighbours, notably the Bosnian Muslim (/Bosniak) bookshop owner Misrad, and continuing as far as is possible to paint and teach. As winter settles in, though, conditions become increasingly desperate.

This is clearly a meticulously researched book, that brilliantly evokes life under the longest modern-day siege in Europe. Its core components are drawn from Morris’ own family’s stories: her great-uncle was a landscape painter whose studio was destroyed in the war, and her father rescued her grandparents from the siege in the freezing winter of 1993 (mirrored in the later phases of the novel). This combination of personal investment and clear, lucid explanation of the fundamentals of what was in many ways an incredibly complex situation, make this a must-read for anyone interested both in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s specifically and, more presciently in 2023, how quickly and tragically a multicultural and civilised European city can be torn about by the the nationalist aggression of a neighbour.

It’s probably this latter factor that has helped Black Butterflies onto the shortlist, in the midst of a seemingly endless assault on Ukraine by Putin’s Russia. There’s so much to muse on here about this conflict, Zora’s conflict, and war in general: how quickly things can devolve, the sudden constraints on freedom of movement, the devasting impact of the changing seasons, and the unthinking brutality of the young soldiers serving their aggressor masters.

But the heart of Black Butterflies is to be found more in its emphasis on the persistance of sustaining factors of everyday life even among such horrors. This covers love of various kinds, with the kindnesses received and given to absent family members transferred in moving ways to those who remain. It also, of course, covers the persistence of art as a sustaining factor. When Zora’s studio, contained in the city’s library, burns down, fragments of the burnt paintings and books are grasped as meaningful artifacts; in the aftermath, Mirsad’s bookshop becomes a substitute library and community centre; bereft of other materials, Zora and her neighbour’s daughter Una paint on their walls using whatever materials they can scrabble together; and at one point Zora trades precious money for held back for food for new art supplies.

This is a novel that’s slightly deceptive in the seeming simplicity of its storytelling, which it achieves through concise language and a relatively linear structure. Beneath that exterior, it’s a book with a lot to say both about the specific and personally tragic circumstances that impacted Morris’ own family and the people of Sarajevo, and about the much more broadly relevant topic of the meeting of the creative powers of art as it is threatened by the destruction and aggression of war.

Score

9

Another brilliant book on what’s so far looking like an extremely strong shortlist. For me, this feels like something of a dark horse contender. It’s timely and relevant, as well as beautifully written. There may be bigger beasts on the shortlist, both in terms of authorial stature and simply scale, but I wouldn’t rule this one out at all.

Next up

Two to go and next up is Louise Kennedy’s Troubles-set Trespasses.