Paul O’Connor takes a look at what he considers an outstanding novel, set during the war that turned Yugoslavia into a hell on earth in 1992.
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES. By Priscilla Morris. Alfred A. Knopf. 278 pages, $28, hardcover.
For those old enough to remember the 1984 Winter Olympics, the thought that the beautiful host city of Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, would be a besieged battlefield by 1992 is almost unthinkable. Turns out that the many “Up close and Personal” TV segments depicting the 500-year-old multicultural city as a place of harmony were naïve fluff. Beneath the surface of Olympic hype laid a bed of ethnic turmoil that led to a three-year war of ethnic slaughter.
British novelist Priscilla Morris didn’t live through the war, but her grandfather did, and it is from his story through the first year of the Sarajevan siege that she developed one of the best novels of 2024.
Zora, the main character, is like Morris’s grandfather, an accomplished artist honored with a studio in the upper floors of the city’s main library. When the war starts in early 1992, she encourages her family to seek refuge in England. She’ll join them soon, she says. The war can’t last long, they all assume.
They are wrong.
When Serbian forces surround the city, cutting it off from the outside world, Zora is trapped. Outside mail stops. Outside phone lines are cut. Food shortages develop and starvation ensues when even weekly relief flights are cancelled because they become too dangerous.
No one can get in, and those caught trying to leave are sent back by Bosnian forces or imprisoned by the Serbs.
Snipers in the hills surrounding Sarajevo prey on civilians simply trying to navigate through the city. The dead are left in the street; stray dogs feast on their corpses. The city becomes crowded with refugees from outlying areas that have fallen to the Serbs, and they move into apartments abandoned by those lucky enough to escape, those killed or those too weak to keep the squatters out.
Big guns in the hills fire indiscriminately into residential buildings, blasting holes in the walls and exposing those who survive to the cold winds and snow of a Bosnian winter.
Through all of this, Zora continues to paint until, one day, when approaching her studio at the centuries-old library, she is stopped by Bosnian soldiers. She has 30 minutes to clear as much as she can carry from her studio. They suspect the Serbs are about to fire upon it. She must leave behind her most important work, a large canvas of a key bridge, one that symbolizes the city’s long history of bridging the cultural divides between religions and ethnicities.
Shells hit the library and set it afire. For days, the fire burns, spewing charred fragments of ancient books, ash she calls black butterflies, across the city.
She continues to teach her painting classes, but her paycheck stops. She survives only on her savings and a neighbor’s securing of a wood stove from a deserted building near the front lines.
Zora’s story is one of a personal hell, one that reminds me of the ordeal Eilish Stack faced in Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, which I reviewed in this space three months ago. But, while Lynch’s work was based on a fear that the growth of authoritarians throughout Europe would reach Ireland, a novel about a dystopian future, Morris’s novel is historical in nature.
Yet the novels share a message: When people start wars, they destroy the lives of innocent people. We need not look to the past or the future to confirm that, only to the front page or main screen of our news sources.
Morris writes beautifully. Her prose is as smooth as her story is chilling. As we read of Zora’s desperation, we are also held in suspense: Will she survive? Will she ever get out? At no point did I feel it was inevitable either way, that Black Butterflies would end in the Irish fashion – see Prophet Song – or the Hollywood fashion.
She keeps us wondering.