‘CONSTANT PUSHING OF BOUNDARIES’ EXPLORED
Novelist challenges prevailing narratives about Afghanistan
Ask award-winning Canadian novelist Deni Ellis Béchard why Afghanistan exercises such a hold on him, and you get an immediate response.
The place is addictive — dangerously so.
He’s been there three times, most recently in 2014, on journalistic assignments and also to do volunteer work. And on each occasion, he felt its seductive pull.
“It’s very addictive to certain personality types because there’s a constant adrenalin rush,” Béchard says.
The same impulse drives the major characters in his new novel, Into the Sun, published in Canada by House of Anansi — but for them the consequences can be devastating. In the opening pages, a car bomb kills three of them in Kabul. Why this happens becomes the mystery at the heart of a story that moves back and forth in time in its quest for the truth.
With this book, the British Columbia-born Béchard also sought to challenge prevailing narratives about Afghanistan.
“I’m trying to break down these narratives,” he says by phone from his home in New York. “I hope readers take away a sense of much greater complexity around these situations. I think westerners are obsessed with our own stories, our own self-realization, and that makes it very hard to go into a country where people live much more fragile lives.”
Béchard, 41, chose not to explore these themes through the prism of the military. Instead, his focus is on the civilians who are attracted to war zones — the journalists, the aid workers, the mercenaries, the idealists. Are their motives always pure? Not always. But the adrenalin rush they feel is real.
“There’s this feeling of exclusivity, of exceptionalism, because you’re at the heart of what’s happening globally. You’re at one of the points of political collision. It’s a very small group, very easy to join, and once you’re in it, you have access to a lot of happenings.”
So is Béchard also talking about himself ?
“Absolutely,” he says. “It’s interesting working in places like that because you lose track of what’s normal. Everybody’s doing pretty crazy things. There’s this constant pushing of boundaries.”
However, he also knows that his own ingrained temperament comes into a play in a place like Afghanistan. In his own words, he has a “high threshold” for intense experiences.
“My father was a criminal. I was raised with a lot of extreme behaviour and got into a lot of trouble growing up … and certainly I have a risk-taking personality that I’ve tried to mellow over the years.”
Béchard’s writing output is eclectic. His quirky first novel, Vandal Love, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He received glowing reviews for The Last Bonobo, a non-fiction work about the great apes of the Congo. And he delved into his personal life with Cures for Hunger, a memoir about growing up with a father who robbed banks. And then there’s his journalism for publications including the Los Angeles Times and Salon. Is there a common link?
He acknowledges a need to pursue subjects he’s “passionate” about.
Then, there are what he calls his memoir moments. “Because my father was a bank robber, it’s hard not to write that story,” he says with a laugh. As for a linking thread: “I guess it’s that, artistically, I want to explore different areas in order to gain a sense of ownership and understanding of these areas.”
Ultimately that’s the driving force behind Into the Sun and its examination of a group of interlocking civilian lives in Kabul. The novel begins tautly with a failed Taliban attack on a house where a group of westerners are partying. The incident sets off disturbing vibes for the book’s first-person narrator, a Japanese-American journalist named Michiko, because of the presence there of three friends involved in a strange emotional triangle.
Two days later, these three die in a car-bomb explosion. Michiko is haunted by the unanswered questions surrounding their murders. Why were these three civilians targeted? The answers partly lie in the past — in places including Quebec, Louisiana, Dubai and Maine. And Michiko must peel off layer after layer of secrecy to reach the surprising truth.
The three victims are Justin, a born-again Christian from Louisiana who teaches English to Afghan youngsters; Alexandra, a Quebec human rights lawyer concerned with the plight of Afghan women; and Clay, a volatile ex-soldier who now lives on the edge as a private contractor.
Béchard sees Justin as typical of the many Americans who became more religious after 9/11 and “got caught up in a surge of religious fervour and righteousness. He wants to feel some agency with this war. Justin embodies this very American complex where Afghanistan is the embodiment of America’s belief in spreading itself around the world.
“Alexandra is “doing quieter aid work … trying to prevent the chronic sexual violence that exists in Afghanistan” in response to her own personal wounds suffered in Canada.
As for Clay, the wildest of the novel’s wild cards, Béchard suggests he’s there to evoke the myth of the U.S. frontier.
“The boom town in the Wild West is where you forge your identity,” and Clay needs a representation of that in the 21st century. “He’s someone who is an outsider in many ways, and by going to war he becomes more American and an archetypal American figure.”
But then there is Michiko, Béchard’s all-important first-person narrator. Why did he set himself the task of getting into the head of a lesbian Japanese-American journalist?
“She certainly required the most work,” Béchard admits. “She tells her story in a way that allows the reader to project upon her. She was challenging to develop, but she is really the voice for the book. I wanted a character who was raised in America from the outside who could write about Afghanistan from the outside.”