The ending to David Bergen's The Time In Between is familiar without being too satisfying or tidy to dismiss and/or forget. The illusionistic prose of the text tells the recurring narrative of personal odyssey and transformation through confronting the other. It reminded me of Douglas Glover's criticism of Sheila Watson's Deep Hollow Creek, which he claimed "belongs on a long shelf of Anglo-colonial novels in which civilised white women go to the bush, fall under the spell of darker people'’s gods, and come away repelled or changed (see, for example, the works of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence)." Bergen is at least aware of the tradition -- loosely alludinging to and, one could argue, reversing the implications of Heart of Darkness in his Acknowledgements -- and gives voice to the Vietnamese encountered in Ada Boatman's quest to understand her father, a Vietnam veteran. Finishing the quest did make me wonder how many times a plot line must be recast before it becomes a genre unto its own -- along the lines of Science Fiction, Harlequin, and what used to be called Thrillers but are now more likely to be read as potential or future movies depending on their quality. This book could be made into a movie, but it would need a stylized rendition to work on screen. I suppose the same could be said of any book.
*
The politics of war disappear in the personal experience, and we are reminded that "any war and any suffering is about the individual." Apparently this book is the Number #1 National Bestseller. This surprises me, perhaps because I haven't read the Globe and Mail in a while, but I can only wonder at the reason this particular book has appealed at this particular moment. Perhaps in reaction to the past five years of highly politicized war. In any event, it's no longer on the Globe's list (funny to see Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing still lingering in the top ten, battling it out with James Patterson et al. I wonder when was the last time a book of CanLit poems lingered so long on the bestsellers was? Amazon.ca ranks it #267 in their sales chain, edging out Margaret Atwood's latest book of short stories by no less than 19,000 places).
*
I was also really surprised to finish the book and come across a section at the end, after the Acknowledgements, of "Discussion Questions for Reading Groups." Perhaps I've been spending too much time comparing and contrasting Morley Callaghan to Ethel Wilson to notice, but when did reading groups become an explicitly targeted audience inside the covers of a text? My favourite question begins, "Safe is an important word..." I bought the book in the Winnipeg Airport when I was caught with time to kill and because I have a soft spot for Winnipeg authors/culture. There's no Winnipeg in the book, but it was still nice to see that Bergen still lives there -- even after winning the Giller and the Margaret Laurence Award. It was finished by the time I landed, and I almost felt like leaving it on the seat the way you do with cottage books.