The Disappeared by Kim Echlin: review

Tash Aw enjoys a novel about music, love and war in Pol Pot's Cambodia, The Disappeared by Kim Echlin

By Tash Aw
Published: BST 25 Aug 2009

After 30 years of nursing memories of an all-consuming love affair with a Cambodian man, Anne Greves meets an old friend from her days in Phnom Penh who urges her to record her story, “For love’s sake”. And so, in prose steeped in poetic sensibilities, Anne recounts the trajectory of this intense relationship: falling in love, aged 16, with Serey, a charismatic Cambodian exile in Montreal; their heady early romance; his return to a Cambodia ravaged by Pol Pot; their unexpected reunion 10 years later; and their final, terrible separation.

Entwining a love story with a novel that also attempts to deal with the devastation of the Khmer Rouge is a daring venture, particularly given the stylistic template Kim Echlin establishes from the outset – a densely poetic, largely static style that condenses a huge amount of material into a novel of just over 200 pages.

Much of Anne and Serey’s early time together involves exuberant youthful passion, lovingly recorded. When they are not making love, they sit in a small room listening to “Khmer rockabilly and surf and soul and two-stringed and four-stringed guitars and Farfisa electric organs and rock drumming” and lyrics Anne does not understand. But underneath this heady young relationship there is a more complex cultural dynamic at work. Anne is “drawn to the gloom and glory” of his exile; she, too, wants an exotic past. Swiftly, she becomes absorbed into his world and his past, but already there are obstacles, for her father is vehemently opposed to her new lover (there is a memorably terse exchange between Papa and Serey on the difference between an immigrant and an exile).

Yet it is the novel’s highly concentrated narrative style that takes centre stage, at times overshadowing even the horrifying details of the Khmer Rouge regime. In one two-page chapter, the first days of Pol Pot’s rule are recreated – an imagined Year Zero: “Banks. Gone./ Mail. Gone./Telephones. Gone./ Radio. Gone.”

It is often tempting to engage with the writing rather than the atrocities that it attempts to describe. Although the finely chiselled prose strives constantly to capture the perfect image – and Echlin rarely puts a foot wrong in this regard – the distillation of such a huge amount of material into relatively few pages produces a density that often feels suffocating. The inevitable consequence of this is a slipping of poetry into sentimentality, which detracts from a frank examination of the crazed condition of love in a time of senseless war. Sentences such as: “The ocean has one taste and it is salt. I believed your body but I knew the words were untrue”, or the one-line chapter 45: “I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as you slept” are undeniably beautiful but, ultimately, they merely flirt with tragedy rather than confront it.

There are moments of genuine tension and power in this novel, always expertly handled – Serey’s confrontation with his younger brother in front of a packed restaurant and Anne’s return to her father in Canada are just two highlights – but elsewhere, the perfectly sculpted interior landscape that Echlin creates often struggles to deal with the enormity of the atrocities of a war-ravaged country .

The Disappeared

by Kim Echlin

235pp, Little, Brown, £11.99

T £10.99 (plus £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or Telegraph Books.