BOOK REVIEW / Nailed to the stones of infidel faith: A Balkan Tolstoy: Hugo Barnacle on the heroic insights of a genuine modern classic: The Bridge over the Drina - Ivo Andric Tr. Lovett F Edwards: Harvill, pounds 8.99

Saul Bellow remarked, notoriously, that the Zulus have no Tolstoy. When pressed on the possible racist implications, he said that for that matter the Bulgarians have no Tolstoy either. 'There. Have I offended the Bulgarians now?' Saul Bellow is a Canadian. Do the Canadians have a Tolstoy?

As it happens, Bulgaria's near neighbours, the Bosnian Serbs, do have a Tolstoy of their own: the late Dr Ivo Andric (1892-1975). His masterpiece, The Bridge over the Drina, is now available in English for the first time in decades. Andric wrote the novel while he was out of work, having been made redundant as Yugoslav ambassador in Berlin when Hitler invaded the Balkans. The story spans four centuries and has no central character apart from the great eleven-arched stone bridge at Visegrad, built as a bequest by an Ottoman grand vizir and blown up by the retreating Austrians at the onset of the Great War in 1914.

In its outline, a tragicomic cycle of small but significant local events, The Bridge resembles Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, but whereas that work is a superior soap, trading in folk stereotypes and facile Manichaean oppositions, this one has a deep social understanding and couches its wisdom in an elegantly pithy style that recalls no one so much as Gibbon. Macho Marquez admires and enjoys cruelty: Andric portrays acts of extreme violence, like the Turks impaling a Serbian saboteur during the bridge's construction, but with a complete absence of gloat or drama which, despite his clear knowledge of the the various technical procedures of killing (or else because of same), always allows compassion for the victim and pity for the killers.

Relatively little of the story is seen through the eyes of Serbs. The longest-serving human character is the Muslim shopkeeper Alihodja, a fervent believer in not getting too worked up about things that are going to happen or not happen anyway. He first appears arguing with a fanatical Muslim guerrilla who wants to stage a suicidal defence of the bridge against the Austrians: about half the book covers this final period. Alihodja is inclined to run on when he knows he has a point; the guerrilla loses patience and leaves him nailed to the bridge by one ear to greet the enemy. Alihodja, puzzled and embarrassed as well as in great pain, is further put out to be freed by an Austrian wearing the red Crusader cross on his armband.

The bridge was a Muslim imperial structure, although the vizir who ordered it had been one of the Serb children annually taken as a tribute by the Sultan: they were carried off to Stamboul in little panniers on donkeys, to be converted and tutored to join the ruling elite. Andric seems to love the bridge, with its wide central kapia or meeting-space, which he knew from his own childhood, and almost to revere the Ottoman way of life that went with it, all that sitting about, smoking and talking. The Austrians he often views with Muslim bafflement: their irreligious 'tight clothing'; their beehive philosophy of work for work's sake; their timesaving schemes like the railway - Sarajevo and back in a day instead of a week - which only make life busier still and thus leave no time saved at all; and their final folly of dynamiting that wonderful bridge.

One piece of the resultant falling masonry falls on Alihodja, snoozing behind his counter in defiance of the evacuation order. He is not killed outright but begins to make his way home up the hill, perplexed.

'Who knows?' Andric writes. 'Perhaps this impure infidel faith that puts everything in order . . . only to demolish and destroy, might spread through the whole world . . . Anything might happen. But one thing could not happen; it could not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth. Should they too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished and had disappeared from the world. That could not be.'

The great and wise Dr Andric is not paying himself any sneaky compliments here; but The Bridge over the Drina is certainly a beautiful and lasting piece of work, and was the chief reason given by the Literature Committee of the Swedish Academy for awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1961. Few Bosnian Serbs seem to have read it; lately they have been too busy blowing up ancient bridges, which they resent as symbolic links between East and West, Muslim and Orthodox.

Andric has no sentimental illusions about unity and tolerance; he writes with realistic enlightenment of 'those 100 or so commonplace words of provincial courtesy' which once allowed the two main communities in Visegrad to rub along despite fierce mutual distrust: everyday greetings which 'circulated like counterfeit coin' but which at least 'made communication both possible and easy'.

Visegrad has been ethnically cleansed now, and lies in Serb hands. It was cleansed before, even as Andric was writing. It was the Jews they came for that time, which may be why he gives Jews such prominence in The Bridge. Lotte, the Jewish hotel manager, claims almost as much space as Alihodja. She is gorgeous and selfless besides. The only Serb character shown in comparable detail is Corkan, an amiable fellow but a drunk. A one-eyed, mildly retarded, born- out-of-wedlock drunk. This could well signify something.

One of Corkan's odd jobs is gravedigging. In his youth he once had to bury the town beauty, a Muslim merchant's daughter who threw herself off the bridge in the middle of her wedding procession. This is a traditional story, found in most cultures in fact and fiction. It is easy to imagine Marquez, or even Bellow, putting the girl's behaviour down to yer typical female touch-me-not, hard-to-get obstinacy; Marquez actually does something of the sort in 100 Years. Myth, song and folktale favour this angle too. But Andric, without omitting the traditional element of the girl's prickly sexual pride, hints judiciously in a couple of lines at the real reason for her suicide: her inability to break or outgrow her attachment to her father.

There are dozens more characters in the book, their lives and thoughts and actions treated with the same insight regardless of their sex, age, creed or occupation, or the times they live in. It is a phenomenal act of sustained imagining, and it is this, coupled with the Gibbonesque sense of historical proportion and collective destiny, that makes Andric not just another Nobel winner but truly a Tolstoy.

(Photograph omitted)