So we are not disappeared
The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander

Sam Haddow
posted 13 March 2008

In 2005 during a two month trip around Argentina, I visited the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, on a Thursday afternoon. The Plaza de Mayo is a large, official, elegant square surrounded by large, official, elegant buildings, with the long pink house of the Argentine government along one side. On this particular visit the number of armed guards seemed to have doubled, and a number of women wearing white scarves were gathered in a group. Enquiries ascertained these were the mothers and grandmothers of the Desaparecidos – the children ‘disappeared’ during the Argentine ‘Dirty War’ from 1976 – 1983. Around thirty thousand people were ‘disappeared’ during this time, most of them never recovered, many presumed tortured and murdered. This group of women were the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo and they have met every Thursday for over three decades now in protest for their lost children.

Nathan Englander’s debut novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, is a story set at the time of these disappearances: Buenos Aires 1976, focusing on the lives of two fictional characters, Kaddish and Lillian Poznan, after their son Pato joines the ranks of the desaparecidos.

Structurally, Englander presents his novel in two parts: before and after Pato’s abduction, and it’s a wise move on his part to devote almost a third of the book to the first section. We are not shown an idyllic or even functional household, but this somehow makes it all the more unbearable when things begin to go wrong. What follows is presented in an entirely episodic fashion; Pato’s abduction provides more than enough narrative thrust to power every subesquent movement, and because of the cyclical nature of the bureacratic nightmare that ensues, his two protagonists rush from one place to another, never getting anywhere, but pursuing their own paths and treating the reader to momentary glimpses of a city in ruins. Another neat touch here is a description of La Recoleta; a city-block sized acropolis in which the tombs of the dead vie against each other for ostentatious splendour. As an observational doctor dryly comments, ‘In this city the dead are worth more than the living’. Which is, in one sense, the driving trope of the novel. Once Pato has been snatched, Kaddish and Lillian’s lives are effectively on hold, potentially over, as there is little guarantee of his return. They exist solely on the memory of a life they will not put to rest, and cannot resurrect.

The Ministry of Special Cases is a split person narrative, seen exclusively through the eyes of two people with one very painful objective in common. As the action unfurls, and the character’s reason beings to slip, the topography, along with everything else, becomes involved in the act of concealing – when it is not being interrogated for information, it does not exist for our protagonists.

Englander completes the isolation of his narrative by excluding his Jewish protagonists from the Jewish community – outsider’s outsiders, as it were. Kaddish (named after the Jewish prayer of mourning, in a neat little avataristic touch) is an hijo de puta – son of a whore. He remains the only Jew, seemingly in the whole of Buenos Aires, who will not apologise for or forget that he is the son of one of the pimps and prostitutes who proliferated during the previous generation. He is paid by more prominent Jews to efface the names of their ne’er do well parents from gravestones, to obliterate any potential embarrassment from their family tree. Both his trade and his obstinacy place Kaddish and his family outside of the community, in a time when neighbours won’t talk to each other, and loyalty to friends and loved ones can vanish in an instant.

So far, so Huxley, Orwell and Kafka, all of whom this book resembles before you even pick it up – The Ministry of Special Cases is a title to evoke Newspeak, Soma and Josef K almost unconsciously. These comparisons are not without cause, or necessarily merit: Englander is a master of the nihilistic one liners, and at intervals we are treated to gems like ‘It was still a government office, but a level of efficiency was apparent’ and ‘You can’t deny what I know is fact.’ ‘I deny it.’ At one point, a stuffy Jewish official proudly produces a typed list of names, and informs Lillian ‘We have gotten them to admit that these are the people we accuse them of taking’. In some ways, we are treading familiar ground here, but it is ground put to refreshing and unsettling use.

Central to this book’s contemporary pertinence is, in addition to its being a story that needs telling, is its evisceration of the ludicrous potential for abuse endemic within a system run on ‘paper’. Based solely on the possession of three unnamed books, Pato is ‘disappeared’, with any and every tactic his parents employ seeming to drive his recovery further from their pitiable reach. Palimpsests of Kafka and Heller emanate from organisational double binds, with habeas corpus as a Tantalus analogy, and our increasingly hysterical protagonists gradually suffocated by red tape and psychobabble. Here is a scathing attack on the abuse of surveillance by a despotic state, and the unwitting compliance of a society too accustomed to inertia to act until it is far too late. This is a warning that needs to be heeded now, in our maximum surveillance ‘security’ state, more than ever.

This wonderful novel is, I believe, the sort of book that should be distributed free on public transport, and flypapered along school corridors. It is the sort of book which should be shoved, with vigour, in Jacqui Smith’s face. Any misplaced belief that an increase in surveillance somehow increases the safety of the populace is torn to pieces here, where the omniscience of information is put to such easily nefarious ends, and this misuse of power closes inexorably over its victims leaving only a trail of psychopathically unintelligible paper. That people could disappear so easily under a military Junta thirty years ago is an unfathomable tragedy. Today, with the infamous ID card scheme seemingly inevitable, it looks like we’re going to willingly put ourselves in the same vulnerable position, only this time with pixels as opposed to paper. I don’t even know if there’s a word for that.