Giller Thriller
And the 2005 winner is David Bergen of Winnipeg, who took his readers into the lives of conflicted Viet émigrés in Canada, in his novel The Time in Between
David Bergen, whose novels have been hitherto set in southeastern Manitoba — familiar terrain for the son of a Mennonite farmer from a small town outside Winnipeg — won the 2005 Giller Prize last night for his novel The Time in Between, set in British Columbia and Vietnam.
It was a night that highlighted the continuing contrast in Canadian fiction between exotic settings and the pull of smalltown Canada. Two of the nominees for the prize — Camilla Gibb in her novel Sweetness in the Belly, and Edeet Ravel in A Wall Of Light
— wrote about Ethiopia and Israel. Two others — Bergen in his novel and Lisa Moore in Alligator — started out in the Canadian hinterlands and then shifted their focus to Vietnam and Louisiana. The fifth nominee, Joan Barfoot, in her novel Luck, stayed squarely in southwestern Ontario, where she has set almost all of her fiction. None of the finalists were as well known as the winners of the Giller Prize in the last halfdozen years: a roll call of Alice Munro, Austin Clarke, Michael Ondaatje, David Adams Richards, Richard B. Wright and M.G. Vassanji. (Their Gillernominated novels also reflected the pull in Canadian literature between such settings as Kenya and Sri Lanka and Barbados, and more traditional arenas of Canadian life such as rural Ontario and New Brunswick.) But regardless of their degree of fame, and regardless of where they have set their fiction, this year’s Giller finalists appealed to readers in a highly traditional manner, with stories of extreme and sometimes violent conflict. David Bergen, 48, who has taught in Winnipeg high schools and written three previous novels, has long probed, with subtlety and insight, life in Manitoba communities where misunderstandings sometimes have fatal consequences.
In his latest novel, he uses his experience as a teacher of Vietnamese refugees in Thailand under the auspices of the Mennonite Central Committee to evoke the unsettling climate of Vietnam. His main characters — a Vietnamese ex- soldier living in B. C. who is returning to his homeland, and his son and daughter — confront fatal misunderstandings in the way of previous Bergen characters, but this time in an alien country.
Barfoot, 59, has lived for the past 20 years in London, Ont., where she worked as a journalist for the London Free Press. Moore, 41, studied creative writing at Memorial University in her native Newfoundland and also art at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design. Gibb, 37, who was born in London, England, but grew up in Toronto, won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000 for her first novel, Mouthing the Words. Ravel, 50, was born on an Israeli kibbutz but moved to Montreal with her family when she was 7 years old.
Returning to Israel in later years, she wrote about her native country in her debut novel Ten Thousand Lovers, which appeared in 2003 and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and an Amazon/Books in Canada prize. With Scotiabank on board as an award co- sponsor for the first time, the purse was increased from $25,000 to $50,000. Of that, the winning author received $40,000; runners-up $ 2,500 each.