Ix-Xhud li ma Deherx by George Zammit

 

Ix-Xhud li ma Deherx

by George Zammit

George Zammit (1908-1990) was a Maltese lawyer, teacher and writer. He is best known for his series of humorous stories featuring couple Wenzu and Rożi, two characters typical of traditional Maltese farce.   These comic tales have since been adapted for radio and tv, ensuring that they remain popular – indeed, the more time passes, the greater the sense of “nostalgia” which this fictional bickering couple seems to evoke.

It could be argued that Zammit’s best work is as a poet, since he wrote volumes of well-regarded verse in Italian, Maltese and English. In 1964, on the encouragement of the then Director of Education, Zammit also published his only novel Ix-Xhud li ma Deherx (literally, “The Witness who didn’t Appear”), which was for many years a set text in secondary schools.

Although completed at a time of great social change in Malta, and despite being set in the years of the Second World War which was then still fresh in the writer's (and his readers’) minds, this historical romance harks back in content and style to the Romantic novels of the 19th Century, with some nods to the grittier social and realist verismo movement.  It deals with the homicide of a rich property broker, and the consequences this shocking event brings to the murderer, to the family of the innocent man wrongly accused of the crime, and to the mysterious, silent witness to the heinous deed. 

Zammit studied to become a priest in Italy prior to leaving the seminary and embarking instead on a career in law. By all accounts, he remained a deeply religious man, and this has a bearing on the novel’s worldview.  In Zammit’s novel, despite the adversities and the innate limitations of human laws, divine justice prevails, and the righteous are rewarded, albeit not without going through struggles and deprivation.  I didn’t mind this traditional approach at all, and frankly thought it a welcome change from the more cynical contemporary fare which I generally tend to read. What I did mind more was the archaic narrative style – one in which it is difficult to distinguish between author and narrator, with the author clumsily intervening in the story both to steer the plot (on the lines of... “but in the meantime, we have left aside the other characters of the story, to whom we now return...”) and to make moral or philosophical observations interrupting the flow of the narration. In one of the chapters, there’s even a quote from Omar Khayyam which, relevant as it may be to the point the novelist wanted to make, seems out of place in the context of a historical novel set in Malta in the Second World War. 

On the plus side, I loved the evocation of a long-gone Malta, especially the quite detailed accounts of air-raids in Valletta and the devastation they brought and the description of rural areas which have in the meantime, alas, succumbed to rampant development. 

This 2018 edition by Klabb Kotba Maltin is an attractively-presented one described as a “revised and updated version.” Probably this refers to revision of spelling to reflect the most recent grammatical norms. However, it would have been interesting to have at least a brief note explaining what the editorial interventions are.