A sensual story survives the horrors of Cambodia's killing fields, writes Stevie Davies
Stevie Davies
The Guardian, Saturday 22 August 2009
Readers of Kim Echlin's electrifying new novel, set in the Khmer Rouge killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, can hardly help but be aware of the UN-backed tribunal on Pol Pot's genocide, now in session. Cambodia's wounds are absolutely fresh and raw: the bones of the dead still work their way to the surface. In an epigraph to The Disappeared, the Canadian writer quotes survivor Vann Nath, a witness at the tribunal: "Tell others." What can a western writer legitimately or authoritatively tell in a work of fiction, especially a love story? We were not there; we neither saw nor suffered. To write such a testament is to dip one's pen into the dark ink of the obscene. Echlin is fully aware of this. When Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1955, he bore witness to western imperialist blood-guilt in Asian atrocities; The Disappeared is first and foremost a love story. It tests erotic and familial love against distinctions of nationality: "People say, It is their country, let them tell it. You are my country." Love fails. The novel, however, does not.
This book is a miracle of economy whose short sentences and ellipses often draw on the powerful brevity of short-story technique. Anne Greves is a Canadian language expert who recapitulates her life story as a work of memory, a letter to the dead. The voice is singular and arresting. A first-person narrative addresses itself to a second person "you": Serey, a Cambodian blues singer whom Anne's 16-year-old self met in a Montreal club. This dual first and second-person device works with insidious urgency to involve the reader: we identify with "I" and are invoked by "you". Mother-loss has made Anne vulnerable. She abandons herself to Serey: "I would never be that self again. I was drowning in you." She dresses in her lover's shirt, to smell him, to become him. Like Anne's mother, he disappears.
Serey returns to Cambodia to locate his family. Eleven years later, she spots him (as she imagines) in a television film of a political rally. Following him to Phnom Penh, Anne lives with him; loses him; tracks him again into delirium and madness. This is a very sensual book, written in an aroused but taut and plain prose that attaches the intensities of erotic love to the smell, sight, taste and touch of human suffering. Cambodia is a mortuary world whose survivors endure continuing chaos, violence, want and corruption. Horror is normal, the heinous ordinary: the Khmer regime deliberately erased the pieties of family, culture, religion and memory itself.
Echlin's heroine is a risk-taker; so, on the literary level, is Echlin. Mythic and literary quotations freight the prose: King Lear, the Book of Ruth and Song of Songs. This ought not to work, but it does. The love dramatised in The Disappeared has a Greek quality. This is a narrative told by Eros about Thanatos; a sexual version of Antigone's quest for her brother's defiled corpse, transgressing laws of state to fulfil a higher law. The novel contains no quotation marks; the seamless prose represents a mind compulsively remembering. Serey, who is rarely named, becomes all but nameless, the vocative sounding into a void. Through such technical and stylistic virtuosity, allied with elliptical narrative brilliance, Echlin raises Anne's climactic ritual action to a level of tragic sublimity.
• Stevie Davies's The Eyrie is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Stevie Davies
The Guardian, Saturday 22 August 2009
Readers of Kim Echlin's electrifying new novel, set in the Khmer Rouge killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, can hardly help but be aware of the UN-backed tribunal on Pol Pot's genocide, now in session. Cambodia's wounds are absolutely fresh and raw: the bones of the dead still work their way to the surface. In an epigraph to The Disappeared, the Canadian writer quotes survivor Vann Nath, a witness at the tribunal: "Tell others." What can a western writer legitimately or authoritatively tell in a work of fiction, especially a love story? We were not there; we neither saw nor suffered. To write such a testament is to dip one's pen into the dark ink of the obscene. Echlin is fully aware of this. When Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1955, he bore witness to western imperialist blood-guilt in Asian atrocities; The Disappeared is first and foremost a love story. It tests erotic and familial love against distinctions of nationality: "People say, It is their country, let them tell it. You are my country." Love fails. The novel, however, does not.
This book is a miracle of economy whose short sentences and ellipses often draw on the powerful brevity of short-story technique. Anne Greves is a Canadian language expert who recapitulates her life story as a work of memory, a letter to the dead. The voice is singular and arresting. A first-person narrative addresses itself to a second person "you": Serey, a Cambodian blues singer whom Anne's 16-year-old self met in a Montreal club. This dual first and second-person device works with insidious urgency to involve the reader: we identify with "I" and are invoked by "you". Mother-loss has made Anne vulnerable. She abandons herself to Serey: "I would never be that self again. I was drowning in you." She dresses in her lover's shirt, to smell him, to become him. Like Anne's mother, he disappears.Serey returns to Cambodia to locate his family. Eleven years later, she spots him (as she imagines) in a television film of a political rally. Following him to Phnom Penh, Anne lives with him; loses him; tracks him again into delirium and madness. This is a very sensual book, written in an aroused but taut and plain prose that attaches the intensities of erotic love to the smell, sight, taste and touch of human suffering. Cambodia is a mortuary world whose survivors endure continuing chaos, violence, want and corruption. Horror is normal, the heinous ordinary: the Khmer regime deliberately erased the pieties of family, culture, religion and memory itself.
Echlin's heroine is a risk-taker; so, on the literary level, is Echlin. Mythic and literary quotations freight the prose: King Lear, the Book of Ruth and Song of Songs. This ought not to work, but it does. The love dramatised in The Disappeared has a Greek quality. This is a narrative told by Eros about Thanatos; a sexual version of Antigone's quest for her brother's defiled corpse, transgressing laws of state to fulfil a higher law. The novel contains no quotation marks; the seamless prose represents a mind compulsively remembering. Serey, who is rarely named, becomes all but nameless, the vocative sounding into a void. Through such technical and stylistic virtuosity, allied with elliptical narrative brilliance, Echlin raises Anne's climactic ritual action to a level of tragic sublimity.
• Stevie Davies's The Eyrie is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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