Trojan tragedy recast for our time
Unsparing in depicting cruelty, despair, brutality
THE COLONIAL HOTEL
Jonathan Bennett (ECW Press)
In her 1961 epic poem Helen in Egypt, Hilda Doolittle reimagined the fate of the Spartan queen who ignited the Trojan War. Far from being held in Troy, the poem suggests, Helen was in fact spirited to Egypt, leaving the Greeks and Trojans to battle over an illusion.
A similar recasting of the story of Paris and Helen is made in Jonathan Bennett’s The Colonial Hotel, a modern-day tale about a foreign doctor and nurse separated by a civil war in an unnamed tropical country. The narration alternates among Paris, dying in a hillside village, Helen, pregnant and determined to save their unborn daughter, and Oenone, the ex-wife of a warlord and now a respected local leader and healer.
Unsparing in his depiction of cruelty, brutality and despair, Bennett steers the reader through an exploration of love and grief, the power of storytelling, the pains of parenthood and uncomfortable truths about international aid (readers may detect resonances with A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, Gil Courtemanche’s tale of lovers separated during the Rwandan genocide).
The story begins during one of the lovers’ retreats to the titular hotel. Paris revels in the simple pleasure of eating a brioche while Helen crosses the street to haggle with a leather vendor. Within minutes, armed soldiers arrive and herd the hotel’s residents onto a truck. Helen and Paris are separated. She escapes, while he is imprisoned by the rebels.
Their leader, a character named only as the Colonel, opts to keep Paris both for his usefulness as doctor and for his value as potential ransom material. So begins a long and solitary imprisonment during which Paris fabricates poignant fantasy “memories” with his unknown daughter.
He also has time to reflect on the past. Neither his nor Helen’s motivations for embracing the peripatetic humanitarian life had been entirely selfless. Helen pursued high-risk nursing as “a way to avoid having love for others, a way to keep people at a distance.” Paris is frank about their modus operandi, chasing fatalities from bombs to famines, floods and outbreaks. “We were overeager to attempt dramatic interventions on the allbut-dead, the pulled-out bodies, the blown-apart, and too-seriously diseased,” he says. “We were often ill-equipped and, it seemed to me, inexperienced.”
It is not surprising to learn that the novel began as sequence of poems. Bennett’s is a supremely lyrical voice both in style and structure and is consistently precise and unsparing.
The novel’s only weakness involves the treatment of the central romance. Paris’s attempts to project meaning onto Helen’s night terrors is understandable, but conveying details of her past through dreams — particularly dreams that are imagined second-hand by her lover — seems a clunky technique for such a sophisticated writer.