National Post (National Edition)
Dodging clichés across the Mexican border
Perilous journey has its flaws, but pays off in end
THE HEROINE’S NAME MEANS, NO KIDDING, ‘PARADISE LOST.’
The Guatemalan highland region where David Bergen’s Stranger starts and ends contains three volcanoes, a dozen quaint villages and an 84,000-year-old lake. That this place boasts a fertility clinic, one catering to wealthy aspiring mothers from the United States, speaks to the inexhaustible lure of ancient things for those whose lives are dictated by the tyranny of the new.
Storytellers are not so different from aspiring mothers. We consult our oracles, reference traditions and resuscitate our faith in the timeless so as to give birth to something fresh and resonant.
Bergen, the Winnipegbased author of The Time in Between and The Age of Hope, with the gift for crafting clean sentences and vivid narration, has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and other illustrious accolades. That this respected member of the Anglo-North American literary establishment would journey to the relatively antediluvian terrain of Central America in search of inspiration makes sense and, for the most part, pays off.
Though there are passages when Bergen’s sympathies are arguably excessive in devotion to any character that constitutes the exotic Other — e.g. anyone Latin American, or poor, or both — Stranger succeeds in taking an archetypal story and making it appealingly strange.
Bergen has certainly given birth to an appealing heroine in Íso Perdido, a young Guatemalan who works at the aforementioned Ixchel clinic, where she tenderly attends to the every need of its clients. One of her clients, it turns out, is Susan, the ostensibly estranged spouse of Eric Mann, an American doctor who works at the clinic and has for some months been Íso’s semi-secret lover. Having been intimate with Eric, Íso is now forced into another, professional intimacy with Susan, who is desperate to conceive.
I’ve no desire to spoil Stranger’s intricate plot, which, despite the rigorous tastefulness of Bergen’s prose, can occasionally resemble a season of General Hospital: involving as it does infidelity, a tragic accident, a case of amnesia, and a truly brutal betrayal and comeuppance — though there is a scene of attempted pueblo justice that were it to reach fruition would echo Paul Bowles or Cormac McCarthy in its humiliation and brutal violence. What matters is that fate and folly send Íso on a peril-ridden quest for personal — and post-colonial — justice, and Stranger’s ageold trajectory overlaps with a more contemporary, if by now equally familiar, story of illegal border-crossing and all the dangers that implies.
Íso travels from Ixchel up through Mexico and much of the United States. Along the way she receives aid from a number of supporting characters, all of whom are either fellow Latinos, immigrants or social outcasts. These outsiders are deftly developed in proportion to their role in Íso’s story; whether or not it can be deemed a case of white man’s guilt, the same cannot be said for the novel’s privileged, Caucasian characters, Susan and Eric among them. Eric especially, with his flowing blond locks, motorbike and quietly condescending attitude toward Íso and her people, is fairly one-dimensional. He feels like the product of a Harlequin romance, albeit a chaste one, since, given Íso’s youth and inexperience, there is a conspicuous paucity of erotic description.
There are details in Stranger that feel a little heavyhanded for such an otherwise elegantly rendered story. Íso is short for Paraíso, and Íso’s surname is Perdido, which means that our heroine’s name, translated into English, means, no kidding, “Paradise Lost.” Íso’s final U.S. destination, where she’ll reunite with the oncedesirable but ultimately profoundly disappointing Eric, is a place called Saint Falls. Such affronts to subtlety, however, are few and finally forgivable.
Bergen’s sculpted prose aside, Stranger is, quite simply, a suspenseful, damned fine adventure yarn — one that benefits from a highly relatable driving impulse and a suitably complex moral vertebra. The more xenophobic among us might regard those who risk life and limb to enter a country illegally and wonder what possible rationale could bring them here. There are, of course, as many answers to that query as there are individual travellers, but, let me assure you, Íso’s reason for coming to America is a doozy.