LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Secret Library that made Syrians feel alive again

THE civil war in Syria is one of the undoubted horrors of our times. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and billions of dollars of damage has been done, essentially to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power.

His face is one which gives himself away. It’s the face of a weak man, promoted well beyond his gifts, compelled to become a bloodthirsty tyrant purely out of fear of the alternative. Does he sleep at night?

Mike Thomson is a widely travelled BBC correspondent who has often reported in war zones looking anxiously worried. His book is about the Syrian town of Daraya, which Assad decided harboured dangerous revolutionaries and so it attacked it with all the weaponry he had.

Most of the population left, but a few thousand remained and stuck it out. The siege lasted for several years before Assad’s superior firepower prevailed.

Astonishingly, Thomson didn’t ever actually go there. He wouldn’t have been able to – it was in lockdown and as tight as a drum. But war in the 21st century isn’t like previous wars. The availability of the internet and mobile phones changes the way things are analysed and reported. Daraya had almost no food or medical supplies, its electricity supplies at best intermittent and fresh water had long been cut off. Those who remained in Daraya rigged up makeshift aerials, allowing at least a rudimentary contact with the outside world.

Thomson made several friends and acquaintances through this method and what these people did was, by any measure, extraordinary. They went around abandoned houses and rescued as many books as they could, then created a secret library in the basement of a ruined building. This was an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

Snipers were everywhere and no one carrying a huge pile of books was going to be moving very fast. Astoundingly, no one was killed. Of even more surprise, Assad’s soldiers never worked out what they were up to.

The Secret Library became a haven for the peacefully inclined to come and read books and feel alive again. It was presided over by a 14-year-old who called himself Chief Librarian and rarely left the building.

There are several photographs of people sitting on sofas, quietly reading of worlds far beyond their own.

Thomson writes breezily of dreadful things, although much of the detail is fascinating.

One woman, whose family lived far away, dared not try to contact them directly, but showed them that she was still alive by changing her Facebook photo image every day.

As food supplies dwindled, one man acquired a small quantity of sheep’s liver. He invited a few friends around to share it and they cooked it slowly to savour the wonderful smell.

Unfortunately, they all left the room at the same moment and, when they came back, they found that the sheep’s liver was gone, and the cat was licking its lips with satisfaction.

If this book has a weakness, there’s not actually very much in it about the Secret Library and some readers may finish it feeling obscurely cheated.

However, the story of Daraya is nonetheless hugely stirring: of people refusing to give in against impossible odds and the appalling consequences of one man’s palpable weakness.

– Syria’s Secret Library by Mike Thomson is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp