Beirut Hellfire Society

August 5, 2019
After his eccentric undertaker father is killed by a stray artillery shell, Pavlov, a brooding and isolated young man, assumes control of the family business in Beirut in this potent novel from Hage (De Niro’s Game). Pavlov’s new responsibilities are accompanied by an invitation to join the secretive Hellfire Society, an order of outcasts and libertines that relied on Pavlov’s father and his hidden crematorium to give them proper funerals. Told over the course of 1978, the story is crafted with a filmmaker’s touch, favoring bold characters and colorful drama to depict the human cost of Lebanon’s civil war. Pavlov accepts the Society’s invitation without hesitation, and soon becomes a makeshift fixer for Beirut’s broken-beyond-repair: a would-be assassin requests his ashes be mingled with his dead son’s; a wealthy widow plans to be exhumed and relocated to the side of her dead lover; the sons of a murdered communist hope to cremate their mother who was denied a grave by religious authorities. Pavlov’s strange responsibilities quickly bring him into conflict with a disturbed militiaman and a violent drug dealer, challenging the carefully cultivated detachment he wears as armor. Hage’s novel is a brisk, surreal, and often comic plunge into surviving the absurd nihilism of war.