Garcia's Heart

Garcia’s Heart by Liam Durcan (McClelland & Stewart 2007)

With the publication of Garcia’s Heart by Liam Durcan, yet another Canadian doctor throws his hat into the ring. Who knew there were so many with literary aspirations?

In this debut novel, Durcan dances across the corpus callosum, proving that the combination of medicine and literature – the left and right brain – make for good fiction. Garcia’s Heart tackles difficult moral conundrums, like the nature of good and evil, innocence and culpability. It also, to a lesser extent, delves into the responsibility of the individual in an increasingly amoral corporate world. Durcan serves up these meditations in a topical exploration of the vagaries of the World Court, and not without a smattering of mystery.

Patrick Lazerenko, an expat Canadian living and working in Boston, learns that his former boss and mentor, Hernan Garcia, is to stand trial in Den Haag for crimes against humanity. He is accused of aiding and abetting the torture of political dissidents in his homeland of Honduras during the turbulent 1980s. Patrick leaves his job – a company he founded – during a critical juncture in order to attend the trial and discern the truth about the man he so well respected.

Complicating matters is the possibility the Patrick might be subpoenaed by either side of the case. The defence wishes to employ his unique expertise as a neuroscientist to discuss Hernan’s ability to judge right from wrong, while the prosecution suspects Patrick withholds damning testimony.

Ah, yes. Did I mention that Hernan’s daughter, Celia, is Patrick’s former lover?

The plot requires much telling to unravel the truth. But it is sufficiently compelling to keep the reader interested. The character of Patrick is also a well-crafted invention, vacillating, pondering, and loving unrequitedly in a very believable fashion.

However, when dealing with highly technical and specialized fields such as neuroscience and law – let alone juggling both in a single novel – an author runs the risk of losing his reader in the minutiae. As affirmed by the novel’s protagonist, "any interesting job could be reduced to a series of bureaucratic functions." Garcia’s Heart stumbles in and out of this mire on a few occasions.

The diction and sentence structure here can also reflect the cumbersome topics. Appositives, subliminal interjections, multiple clauses, and dense vocabulary can combine to create some tricky prose from time to time:

"He was also, despite his designation as protege, miserable in the office where his recent arrival and prepubescent appearance combined with the insecurity of the business-types to bleed credibility from him...with a bit of supportive psychotherapy and an implied challenge to his intelligence – motivational tactics Patrick had mastered as a thesis supervisor – he agreed to stay."

Ultimately, these are small quibbles. Garcia’s Heart is a confident debut novel that will leave you wondering "what had to happen for a life to double in on itself, for separate trajectories to form and diverge, and if living this lie took as great a toll as another having to discover it."

October

October by Richard B. Wright (Harper Collins 2007)

I am always surprised by how much I enjoy Richard B. Wright’s work. It all seems so simple and straight-forward in the telling. October is no exception. The plot is uncomplicated; the language, unadorned. And yet the story resonates long after you put it down.

While travelling in England to visit his cancer-stricken daughter, retired professor James Hillyer chances upon an acquaintance whom he has not encountered in more than sixty years. Gabriel Fontaine, once a sixteen-year-old boy befriended by James during a summer vacation, is now aged and infirm – just as close to death’s door as his own daughter. Friendless, but for a hired nurse, Gabriel requests of James something so intimate and bizarre that it would tax even the thickest of friendships. However, as it stands, the two men were never more than acquaintances of proximity who could little more than tolerate each other’s company at times. And James finds that even now, sixty years after the fact, he is still jealous and bitter over the young woman Gabriel won from him that fateful summer.

Nonetheless, compassion carries the day, and less than forty-eight hours later, James finds himself on a flight to Switzerland in the company Gabriel and his young nurse.
Part love story, and part meditation on mortality, October shifts back and forth between the present and the past, from England and Switzerland to the summer of 1944 in the coastal village of Perce, Quebec.

The secret to Wright’s success in this novel is his economy of language, and the concision with which he is able to sketch the most believable and psychologically complex characters at that exact moment in their lives when they are grappling with humanity’s most important mysteries. In October, Wright demonstrates a keen grasp of the complicated emotions within any relationship, and he uses this understanding to weave a story that is not only believable, but, in fact, inevitable.

October is a case of all the right words in all the right places.

Stormy Weather

Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles (Harper Collins 2007)

Stormy Weather is the follow-up novel to Paulette Jiles’ wildly popular and critically acclaimed first novel, Enemy Women. With it, she proves, without a doubt, that her writing has staying power.

Stormy Weather is the story of Jeanine Stoddard, her sisters, and their mother. Deserted and humiliated by their mercurial father and husband, Jack Stoddard, the women must negotiate the uncharted world of East and Central Texas during the Great Depression.

Jeanine, the middle-child, skinny and fierce, leads her mother and sisters out of the oil fields and back to the abandoned Tolliver farm of her mother’s childhood. There, they struggle to survive drought, dust storms, back taxes, injury, and the stigma of poverty.

But while the Great Depression and its hardships are common fodder for fiction, Jiles’ story of rough and tumble East Texas, its oil fields, its illegal horse racing, and its unforgettable characters is fresh enough.

Her prose, too, is vital, sweeping over vast distances in time and space at one moment, and honing into focus on a single scene the next. It is difficult to shake certain images in this book, such as the blind man who helps Jeanine load her drunken father into the family jalopy. Or the moment she catches her neck-scarf in the gearbox of an ancient tractor. The scene with Jeanine’s sister Bea at the well is transfixing, and the night Jeanine last speaks to her father in the family shed is also haunting.

The one problem with this novel might be the end. It cannot be said that Jeanine and her family do not undergo hardship in this story; however, I am wary of stories that end too well. They seem unlikely. And while Jiles does try to temper this fortune, it still smacks a little of Hollywood.

Nonetheless, Stormy Weather will lead you by the nose. A great read.