By Philip Marchand
The National Post
Last Updated: May 5, 2011
Among the numerous episodes of mass murder characteristic of the 20th century, the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia stands out as one of the most bizarre and horrifying. Overrunning Cambodia in 1975, this revolutionary army waged war on half the population of the country — anybody educated, middle class, living in a city. Before the Khmer Rouge or the Angkar (the organization) were finished, well over a million Cambodians had died at their hands.
“Families are a disease of the past,” ran one of their tenets, as quoted in Madeleine Thien’s novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, and so families were split apart and individual members driven into rural communes where they worked the fields and perished from disease, starvation and execution. Interrogators extracted confessions from these forced labourers, detailed written accounts of their lives. If the accounts were deemed unsatisfactory they were rewritten several times. It was a highly organized attempt to reduce every person to zero.
Canadian fiction, whose collective antennae quiver all too readily at the presence of dark matter, has never shied away from dealing with victims of historical world catastrophes, notably the Holocaust. Novelist and critic Brian Fawcett dealt with the Cambodian genocide in his characteristically lively and provocative fashion with his 1986 Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, but Thien’s novel is the first I can recall that plunges the reader directly into the midst of this gruesome catastrophe.
The novel, which begins in 2005, contains a number of characters and points of view, but the main perspective is provided by a first-person narrator named Janie, a neurological researcher at a Montreal institute, who was a young girl in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. The heart of the novel is its mid-section, in which Janie — her father having disappeared, her mother fatally worn by hunger — recounts the horrors of her rural commune and her subsequent escape from the country, with the help of her brother who dies during the escape attempt. Thirty years later, she cannot rid herself of survivor guilt, a malady with ruinous effects on her relationship with her husband and her young son.
This is harrowing stuff, but before absorbing it, a reader must come to terms with certain structural and stylistic aspects of the novel. Her sentences tend to be poetically constructed, with idiosyncratic use of language. “Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges,” Janie states. I do not understand rust “burnishing.” The word one would think normally applies in this context is “tarnish” not “burnish,” but there may be a poetic logic at work I am missing. In similar fashion, referring to her seven-year-old son, Janie comments, “I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.”
I have parsed this sentence a couple times but cannot extract any meaning from it other than it’s hard to know what someone else is thinking.
I do not mean to be picky, and there are certainly striking passages throughout the novel, but it is fair to say Thien’s language does tend to call attention to itself in ways that are not always fortunate. Partly this is a consequence of her awareness that language is intimately associated with perception. Distorted language leads to distorted perception and vice versa. That her protagonist works at a neurological research institute is, in this respect, a useful device — researchers can see how thought, memory and the body disintegrate due to chemical imbalances in the brain, the same way thought, memory and the body separate due to the extreme stress of war. Hallucinations result, and surreal perceptions. “I have too many selves and they no longer fit together,” Janie says, which partly explains why she feels “the tiled walls begin to shudder” when the subway train pulls into the station. In this psychic state, rust may well appear to be burnished.
Narrative becomes disjointed, impressionistic, almost incoherent. Here is how Janie recalls the attack of pirates on the boat that is carrying her and other refugees from Cambodia: “I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done.” It is dangerous for a narrator in a novel to confess to a loss of language, but that’s what we have here, a breakdown of narrative combined with heightened sensory and emotional input.
“Nothing seemed real,” Janie recalls of her experience with the Angkar. States of lucidity give way to states of “half-dreaming,” and sometimes the reader has to decide what is dream and what is waking. “Maybe this life is the dream,” Janie ponders. Even in relatively placid Montreal, schizophrenia in some form or other keeps a tight grip on her, particularly when a reminder of the past strikes. “I began sliding into a numb melancholy,” she comments after one such reminder. “The world seemed bled of colour, yet I had vivid, exhausting dreams.” Accompanying this confession is a further admission. “No matter how much we wished for it, no matter what we did, some ghosts could never be put to rest.”
This motif of ghosts is the culmination of the novel’s treatment of the disintegration of personality and perception. It is true that the Angkar does not succeed in erasing the identity of its victims, but its determined attempt to wipe out family ties and even normal human culture make it difficult for survivors to mourn and commemorate their dead. Ghosts thrive under these circumstances.
This naturally raises the question: Is there such a thing as the soul, the pralung? The novel edges toward the affirmative. The moral of the story lies in the Buddhist-flavoured wisdom of Janie’s mother, who tells her daughter, before the horror descends, “We did not come in solitude … Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives. From the first morning to the last, we try to carry them until the end.”
More than such a statement is required of the author, however. A sense of resolution must emerge from the various elements in the novel itself. It is difficult to feel that resolution, mostly because the characters are shadowy to begin with, too lacking in distinctive human personality, quite apart from their experience of Cambodia.
Among the numerous episodes of mass murder characteristic of the 20th century, the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia stands out as one of the most bizarre and horrifying. Overrunning Cambodia in 1975, this revolutionary army waged war on half the population of the country — anybody educated, middle class, living in a city. Before the Khmer Rouge or the Angkar (the organization) were finished, well over a million Cambodians had died at their hands.
“Families are a disease of the past,” ran one of their tenets, as quoted in Madeleine Thien’s novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, and so families were split apart and individual members driven into rural communes where they worked the fields and perished from disease, starvation and execution. Interrogators extracted confessions from these forced labourers, detailed written accounts of their lives. If the accounts were deemed unsatisfactory they were rewritten several times. It was a highly organized attempt to reduce every person to zero.
Canadian fiction, whose collective antennae quiver all too readily at the presence of dark matter, has never shied away from dealing with victims of historical world catastrophes, notably the Holocaust. Novelist and critic Brian Fawcett dealt with the Cambodian genocide in his characteristically lively and provocative fashion with his 1986 Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, but Thien’s novel is the first I can recall that plunges the reader directly into the midst of this gruesome catastrophe.
The novel, which begins in 2005, contains a number of characters and points of view, but the main perspective is provided by a first-person narrator named Janie, a neurological researcher at a Montreal institute, who was a young girl in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. The heart of the novel is its mid-section, in which Janie — her father having disappeared, her mother fatally worn by hunger — recounts the horrors of her rural commune and her subsequent escape from the country, with the help of her brother who dies during the escape attempt. Thirty years later, she cannot rid herself of survivor guilt, a malady with ruinous effects on her relationship with her husband and her young son.
This is harrowing stuff, but before absorbing it, a reader must come to terms with certain structural and stylistic aspects of the novel. Her sentences tend to be poetically constructed, with idiosyncratic use of language. “Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges,” Janie states. I do not understand rust “burnishing.” The word one would think normally applies in this context is “tarnish” not “burnish,” but there may be a poetic logic at work I am missing. In similar fashion, referring to her seven-year-old son, Janie comments, “I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.”
I have parsed this sentence a couple times but cannot extract any meaning from it other than it’s hard to know what someone else is thinking.
I do not mean to be picky, and there are certainly striking passages throughout the novel, but it is fair to say Thien’s language does tend to call attention to itself in ways that are not always fortunate. Partly this is a consequence of her awareness that language is intimately associated with perception. Distorted language leads to distorted perception and vice versa. That her protagonist works at a neurological research institute is, in this respect, a useful device — researchers can see how thought, memory and the body disintegrate due to chemical imbalances in the brain, the same way thought, memory and the body separate due to the extreme stress of war. Hallucinations result, and surreal perceptions. “I have too many selves and they no longer fit together,” Janie says, which partly explains why she feels “the tiled walls begin to shudder” when the subway train pulls into the station. In this psychic state, rust may well appear to be burnished.
Narrative becomes disjointed, impressionistic, almost incoherent. Here is how Janie recalls the attack of pirates on the boat that is carrying her and other refugees from Cambodia: “I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done.” It is dangerous for a narrator in a novel to confess to a loss of language, but that’s what we have here, a breakdown of narrative combined with heightened sensory and emotional input.
“Nothing seemed real,” Janie recalls of her experience with the Angkar. States of lucidity give way to states of “half-dreaming,” and sometimes the reader has to decide what is dream and what is waking. “Maybe this life is the dream,” Janie ponders. Even in relatively placid Montreal, schizophrenia in some form or other keeps a tight grip on her, particularly when a reminder of the past strikes. “I began sliding into a numb melancholy,” she comments after one such reminder. “The world seemed bled of colour, yet I had vivid, exhausting dreams.” Accompanying this confession is a further admission. “No matter how much we wished for it, no matter what we did, some ghosts could never be put to rest.”
This motif of ghosts is the culmination of the novel’s treatment of the disintegration of personality and perception. It is true that the Angkar does not succeed in erasing the identity of its victims, but its determined attempt to wipe out family ties and even normal human culture make it difficult for survivors to mourn and commemorate their dead. Ghosts thrive under these circumstances.
This naturally raises the question: Is there such a thing as the soul, the pralung? The novel edges toward the affirmative. The moral of the story lies in the Buddhist-flavoured wisdom of Janie’s mother, who tells her daughter, before the horror descends, “We did not come in solitude … Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives. From the first morning to the last, we try to carry them until the end.”
More than such a statement is required of the author, however. A sense of resolution must emerge from the various elements in the novel itself. It is difficult to feel that resolution, mostly because the characters are shadowy to begin with, too lacking in distinctive human personality, quite apart from their experience of Cambodia.
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