London Free Press
Sat, March 28, 2009
By NANCY SCHIEFER, SPECIAL TO SUN MEDIA
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
"T hings do not suddenly happen to us. Things happen step by step." These are the thoughts of Kim Echlin's protagonist, Anne Greves, as she nears the end of a dangerous pilgrimage in the Toronto writer's new novel, The Disappeared. They are words echoed on every page of Echlin's remarkable novel.
When the book opens, Anne is a young, Montreal girl interested in blues music. While at a jazz club with friends, she meets a young Cambodian man, 21-year-old Serey, five years her senior, who is in exile in the West. The year is 1979, Cambodia is controlled by the odious Pol Pot regime and Serey, a musician, is unable to contact his family. The borders, and all communication, have been closed.
Anne and Serey fall deeply in love, much to the dismay of Anne's father, a widower, who has raised her in an emotionally remote manner, with the help of a French housekeeper. Anne's affair with Serey, although reckless, is rich and rewarding. Looking back, Anne muses, "I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law. Everything was animal sensation and music. You were my crucifixion, my torture and rebirth. I loved your eyes, the tender querying of your voice in song." She remembers, too, that what she learned from her mother is "that those we love can disappear suddenly, inexplicably. And then there is nothing."
When the Vietnamese invade Cambodia and the Pol Pot government is overthrown, Serey does, indeed, disappear. He tells Anne he must return to find his parents and younger brother, to know if they have survived. He made no promise to return. Anne is frantic. "I wanted the borders to close again, so I could have you back. I wanted you to die so I would not have to think of you without me. I wanted money. I wanted to be older. I wanted you to find your whole family alive so I could be with you. I wanted you to find your family dead so you would be mine."
Echlin's novel shifts, then, from radiant love story to desperate search. After waiting 11 years for Serey, Anne, consumed by erotic longing, sets out to find him. She arrives in Phnom Penh during the turmoil of national elections. Corruption is rampant. Violence trumps reason and chaos prevails. "They talked about observing elections but no one saw the village meetings after dark when people were told how to vote and people who asked questions were beaten, killed. Foreigners said, Keep the eyes of the world here, but the people knew that borders and banks close and foreigners leave and wires are cut and bodies disappear and the thirst for power spreads like the odour of rotting, terrifying everyone into obedience. No one can force compassion. But it can be extinguished."
With the help of Mau, a taxi driver, and a fellow Canadian dispatched to Cambodia to record the genocide that had happened there, Anne finds her lover, changed, as is she, by the traumatic events of the decade they had spent apart. But their love remains strong, struggling to flourish despite the fate of Serey's family, despite the guilt he carries, despite the underground political work with which he is now engaged. Serey had found Cambodia a fraud, a country with the false trappings of a new democracy, but without the reality. The round-the-clock killing had continued. The country was "like a shattered slate. Before they could think of drawing lines on it, they had to find the pieces and fit them together again."
Looking back, years later, Anne remembers she and her lover had pledged themselves to each other, despite what they knew might happen. Even unto death. "There is no one to witness to us and so we were witnessed only by the nameless missing and by the generations to come. And this was the night our baby was conceived, a soul leaving the dry sky of the ancestors to live anew in bones and flesh."
In a brief 228 pages, Echlin manages to juxtapose the horrific depravity of the Pol Pot era, and its brutal successor, against the power and resilience of individual human courage. In the book's closing section, Ang Tasom, Anne, at her own insistence, is forced to confront he bones and skulls not only of a broken country, but of her own broken life. What her journey has given her, and what she retains when she returns, as witness, gives meaning to her experience and helps to hold the past intact.
As were her earlier novels, Elephant Winter and Dagmar's Daughter, The Disappeared is written with singular elegance, a polished, poetic, deeply affecting novel from a writer in impressive control of her craft.
Sat, March 28, 2009
By NANCY SCHIEFER, SPECIAL TO SUN MEDIA
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
"T hings do not suddenly happen to us. Things happen step by step." These are the thoughts of Kim Echlin's protagonist, Anne Greves, as she nears the end of a dangerous pilgrimage in the Toronto writer's new novel, The Disappeared. They are words echoed on every page of Echlin's remarkable novel.
When the book opens, Anne is a young, Montreal girl interested in blues music. While at a jazz club with friends, she meets a young Cambodian man, 21-year-old Serey, five years her senior, who is in exile in the West. The year is 1979, Cambodia is controlled by the odious Pol Pot regime and Serey, a musician, is unable to contact his family. The borders, and all communication, have been closed.
Anne and Serey fall deeply in love, much to the dismay of Anne's father, a widower, who has raised her in an emotionally remote manner, with the help of a French housekeeper. Anne's affair with Serey, although reckless, is rich and rewarding. Looking back, Anne muses, "I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law. Everything was animal sensation and music. You were my crucifixion, my torture and rebirth. I loved your eyes, the tender querying of your voice in song." She remembers, too, that what she learned from her mother is "that those we love can disappear suddenly, inexplicably. And then there is nothing."
When the Vietnamese invade Cambodia and the Pol Pot government is overthrown, Serey does, indeed, disappear. He tells Anne he must return to find his parents and younger brother, to know if they have survived. He made no promise to return. Anne is frantic. "I wanted the borders to close again, so I could have you back. I wanted you to die so I would not have to think of you without me. I wanted money. I wanted to be older. I wanted you to find your whole family alive so I could be with you. I wanted you to find your family dead so you would be mine."
Echlin's novel shifts, then, from radiant love story to desperate search. After waiting 11 years for Serey, Anne, consumed by erotic longing, sets out to find him. She arrives in Phnom Penh during the turmoil of national elections. Corruption is rampant. Violence trumps reason and chaos prevails. "They talked about observing elections but no one saw the village meetings after dark when people were told how to vote and people who asked questions were beaten, killed. Foreigners said, Keep the eyes of the world here, but the people knew that borders and banks close and foreigners leave and wires are cut and bodies disappear and the thirst for power spreads like the odour of rotting, terrifying everyone into obedience. No one can force compassion. But it can be extinguished."
With the help of Mau, a taxi driver, and a fellow Canadian dispatched to Cambodia to record the genocide that had happened there, Anne finds her lover, changed, as is she, by the traumatic events of the decade they had spent apart. But their love remains strong, struggling to flourish despite the fate of Serey's family, despite the guilt he carries, despite the underground political work with which he is now engaged. Serey had found Cambodia a fraud, a country with the false trappings of a new democracy, but without the reality. The round-the-clock killing had continued. The country was "like a shattered slate. Before they could think of drawing lines on it, they had to find the pieces and fit them together again."
Looking back, years later, Anne remembers she and her lover had pledged themselves to each other, despite what they knew might happen. Even unto death. "There is no one to witness to us and so we were witnessed only by the nameless missing and by the generations to come. And this was the night our baby was conceived, a soul leaving the dry sky of the ancestors to live anew in bones and flesh."
In a brief 228 pages, Echlin manages to juxtapose the horrific depravity of the Pol Pot era, and its brutal successor, against the power and resilience of individual human courage. In the book's closing section, Ang Tasom, Anne, at her own insistence, is forced to confront he bones and skulls not only of a broken country, but of her own broken life. What her journey has given her, and what she retains when she returns, as witness, gives meaning to her experience and helps to hold the past intact.
As were her earlier novels, Elephant Winter and Dagmar's Daughter, The Disappeared is written with singular elegance, a polished, poetic, deeply affecting novel from a writer in impressive control of her craft.
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