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At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop   {Reviewed by STELLA} Mesmerising from the opening lines, At Night All Blood is Black will take hold in its repetitive, rhythmic structure, creating a landscape of madness and violence that is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, and viscerally rich. This is trench warfare pared back to the lives of two Senegalese soldiers fighting for the French. Spurred on by mistaken loyalty to the mother country and by the false cultural narrative (encouraged by their Captain) of the fearsome savage — the brave, rising into no-man’s land on the shrill whistle — the attack signalled for all, both friend and foe, these two men run side-by-side screaming into the void. Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are more-than-brothers, raised in the same village, in the same family, with a shared life that binds them to each other and their destiny. The opening paragraphs of Alfa’s confession to a crime lead us quickly to the death of Mademba. In looping sequences, David Diop carves out the story through Alfa’s guilt and his jarring memories in line with the young man’s descent into madness. Guilty for denying his more-than-brother’s dying request, not once but three times, Alfa sets out to avenge his enemy as well as his conscience in an increasingly gruesome manner. An activity, at first applauded and then reviled by his brothers in arms, as well as his superiors — who eventually send him away from the front — unnerves his companions. With a brevity of action and repetitive narrative, Diop (with the excellent translation of Anna Moschovakis) invades us with the rawness, violence and fear of the front, with the absurdity of the actions of war, and the disturbing hollowing of emotion only to be replaced with superstition and mistrust. As Alfa wreaks havoc in a situation overwhelmingly chaotic, he becomes further separated from reality, and increasingly isolated, living to his own strange rationale, and becomes a symbol of bad luck, and feared by his fellow soldiers. In the second half of the book, reassigned to the Rear and a psychiatric ward, Alfa’s grip on reality tips further. Here, as his memories of village life, the disappearance of his mother, the social politics of his age sect, and the friendly rivalry, as well as enduring bond, with Mademba, come to the fore as the intensity of the Front is pushed aside, we sense why his madness descended so intensely. Here, we have myth and story. Here, we see that Alfa, without his French-speaking more-than-brother Mademba, is at sea on the battlefield and in his ability to communicate beyond gesture and drawing. Diop cleverly keeps us in Alfa’s head, our mad and unreliable narrator, but gives us enough clues to set the alarm ringing as we dip into a dream-like sequence that will take us somewhere unexpected. So unexpected that you will loop back to the start to read this slim, but unforgettable novel with fresh eyes. Stunning, unrelenting and beautifully executed.