The killing fields of Cambodia loom large in the twentieth century’s catalogue of horrors. How to absorb the reality that Pol Pot and his followers massacred more than a million of their own people, driving them out of the cities into a countryside where they were starved and beaten to death?
In her second novel Madeleine Thien enters this harrowing territory. Janie, the central character, is losing herself, disintegrating under the weight of her memories of her lost childhood and of her parents who were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. As her family’s lone survivor, Janie was given a new life in Canada, arriving as an unaccompanied minor “in the language of the aid world.” As the novel opens, in 2005 in Montreal, she has suddenly left her husband and child out of fear that she will harm them. This lost soul, brutally torn from her own family as a child, feels unbearable shame and guilt.
Thien shifts perspectives throughout the novel, and in sometimes confusing time sequences we learn why Janie has sought refuge in the apartment of her friend Hiroji, and why Hiroji himself has vanished. Hiroji is a neurological researcher, and Janie’s assistance in his work parallels her own life where her soul, or mind, or being (or all three) has lost its unity. Her identity has been fractured, just as Hiroji’s subjects find their selves “dwindling” and disappearing. Janie’s inability to integrate her past self with her present reality is the core of the novel, and she must reach back into that other country, the past, for any hope in the present.
The narrative entitled “Mei,” describing the horrific experience of Janie and her brother under the Khmer Rouge, is the most powerful. Thien succeeds remarkably well in presenting the terror through a child’s eyes. The description of the children’s suffering, and their eventual perilous flight from Cambodia after the deaths of their parents, is almost unbearable. This story is the heart of the book, drawing us into the past that has splintered present-day Janie.
The narrative shifts back and forth from Montreal to past and contemporary Cambodia. Thien knows her Montreal winter; Janie is chilled in body and soul as she wanders the icy streets. Domestic interiors are not so well rendered, and there are some jarring instances of over-writing: “The orange light of his truck spins over us like quiet laughter.” Particularly in the case of Kiri, Janie’s seven-year-old son, the dialogue is stilted and artificial, and Janie’s husband Navin remains an unformed figure.
But Janie herself is well-realized, a character tossed about by the tides of history and choosing life, a character for whom words like reconciliation and closure have no meaning. Her journey lies in trying to re-build, trying to gather all her lives, the pralung or soul of which her long-dead mother spoke.
Can fiction
deal with unimaginable evil? Can the fictionalized story of a child in the
killing fields bring us understanding? The New
York Times obituary for Jorge Semprun, a Spanish writer whose work dealt
with his experiences in Buchenwald, cites his conviction that fiction is "a
tool for unveiling, not obscuring, the truth.“
Madeleine Thien has, bravely I think, chosen to write about a particular
evil reality. Through Janie she unveils a dreadful truth.
Dogs at the Perimeter, by Madeleine Thien
Format: Hardcover, 264 pages
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8408-9 (0-7710-8408-0).
Reviewed by Vancouver writer, librarian and former bookseller Margaret O'Brien.
Some writers will choose not to self-publish. They may prefer not to spend the time it takes to edit, publish, market and sell their own work. But if they do wish to self-publish, it is now possible to do so without losing face and without losing money. That’s the game changer.
Funerals in Covid times take on a special character. Norman Ravvin writes about what a Jewish funeral is like now, a theme he considers on Polish ground in his recent novel, The Girl Who Stole Everything.
This is, in short, the busiest time of the year for literary publishers here, perhaps even more so than elsewhere in Canada, since the Quebec industry takes its lead from France in its single-minded focus on the fall.
Kim Thuy
Contributing editor Leigh Kinch-Pedrosa chats with author Jonah Campbell.
