A little too much romance and not enough disaster
This debut novel spends too much time on relationships at the expense of its intriguing setting of the aftermath of an earthquake.
VIET Dinh’s debut novel seems to have been written for a selected group of people and thus has niche market written all over it. And the description that I would use for After Disasters is “ambitious but misguided”, though I know this does not do the novel many favours.
The premise of After Disasters is simple: the novel follows the lives of four individuals trying for normality after surviving a life-changing earthquake in India. The story is told from the perspectives of four people who, responding to the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, find themselves in similar locations – emotionally, mentally, physically – as they carry out duties called for by their respective organisations.
Ted is a former pharmaceutical salesman who is now a member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART); Piotr is a fellow DART colleague who has not recovered from the trauma of his recent posting in Bosnia; Andy is a young English firefighter who wants to be seen as more than just a young firefighter by his colleagues; Dev is an Indian doctor who, with limited financial and human resources and short on time, is trying his hardest to respond to the needs of his people.
I have to say, Dinh has a flair for the dramatic: the opening prologue has Ted and Piotr travelling from New York to India, both curious and nervous about what they will find when they make it to the site of the earthquake. To demonstrate aid worker chatter, Dinh litters Ted and Piotr’s dialogue with response jargon such as “Usaid”, “emergency sex” and “watsan”. While these words are not very far removed from the vocabulary used by TV news channels, for the average reader who has no background knowledge in humanitarian aid response, the manner in which Ted and Piotr communicate with one another could be somewhat off-putting.
The opening chapters of After Disasters start off promisingly enough: a huge earthquake takes place, aid workers from all corners of the planet descend on the ruined city, and Dinh uses enough jargon to make aid workers excited to be reading about their job in fiction form. (Disclosure: This reviewer is an aid worker.)
In between describing the aid being provided on the ground, Dinh provides extensive and diverse backstories for his protagonists, of whom two are gay, one is sexually uncertain, and one who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from previous missions in conflict zones. And this is where the novel falls down: Dinh is insistent about focusing on the intimate relationships of his characters rather than their personal relationships and their reactions to their work, and this, to me, spoils the narrative somewhat.
Dinh devoted an entire chapter, which makes up almost a quarter of the novel, to the meetings between and lustful escapades of two of his protagonists in the late 1990s. The manner in which the two fall for one another is even faster than emergency sex (humanitarian aid shortcut used to describe using sex as a means to relieve stress).
With two gay characters, it was pretty predictable that they would end up together. Spending so much time on their antics regresses the novel from being about the lives of aid workers in the aftermath of a natural disaster to a gay version of Mills & Boon set in a disaster zone.
Dinh redeems himself, though, with his other, straight, protagonist by giving him a backstory that is as realistic as a real-life aid worker who has been in one conflict zone too many. Again, unless the average reader has been living and working in conflict zones of the world, there will be a sense of disconnect with the narrative in this part of the book – which, by the way, could use with some editing.
And this is why I called After Disasters an ambitious but misguided novel. While the angle of the novel – that of aid workers responding to emergencies on the ground – may scream niche market, Dinh’s writing may attract a few curious readers. The need to focus his novel on the (intimate, not-so-platonic) relationships between his characters is a downer, though, as the mood of the novel shifts from being a tale of aid workers to romance in disaster zones.
After Disasters is not atrociously bad, I just think it will have limited appeal.