Something unusual happened as I was reading Michael Helm’s new novel, Cities of Refuge. I stumbled upon a couple paragraphs which I realized alluded to real events. At least I thought they alluded to real events. They had enough specificity that I was willing to believe that they alluded to real events. The problem is: the events in question were a matter of confidential knowledge. They concerned a refugee claimant who applied to the IRB (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada) on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. The IRB had denied the claim and so the claimant was remaining illegally in the country. How could Helm print this? I asked myself. It could expose the person. I reread the paragraph and realized that it was me reading specificity into the passage; it was me almost wishing for the passage to be real so I could challenge Helm on a breach of ethics, maybe pick a fight with him. As it turns out, that impulse gives me a lot in common with the novel’s main character.
Cities of Refuge opens with an assault. Twenty-eight year old Kim Lystrander is dragged into a dark construction site and although she fights off her assailant, she suffers an injury which requires surgery. To cope, Kim writes about what happened. She never saw her assailant and her memory is unclear about certain details. As a consequence, her writing is not strictly factual but it allows her to recover from psychic trauma and the almost inarticulable sense of loss it brings. In other words, she uses fiction to leverage a deeper truth about herself. That’s the theory. However, Kim’s father gives that theory a run for its money.
Harold Lystrander is a waning academic, a historian who never rose above mediocrity and whose best work was a study on Central American Protestantism. It is under his influence that we find such intellectualisms as “Desire itself was fundamentally mimetic. It called for an answer.” and “Good aesthetics don’t promote good ethics. They often nurture evasion.” And he is unequivocally under the influence when we find what I officially deem to be my favourite chapter opener of any novel I’ve ever read: “At ten in the morning the college’s librarian had found Harold drunk and weeping in the Divinity stacks.”
Kim regards her father as a bit of a fuck up. In addition to a failed academic career and a love of alcohol, Harold numbers among his many accomplishments a failed marriage, a couple failed affairs, and the abandonment of his daughter when she was a teenager. One thing deliberately omitted from his dubious cv is the fact that he was studying Spanish in Santiago in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet unseated Salvadore Allende. When Kim discovers this fact, she theorizes that her father must have witnessed horrible things and it is the lingering memory of these horrors which accounts for his fucked-upness.
As seems to be a pattern for Kim, she comes to terms with her father’s shortcomings by writing about him. She constructs an admittedly fictional account of the events from his student days, but she has done such meticulous research that her writing as a striking verisimilitude. She has even gone so far as to consult a contemporary who knew him in Santiago and who has since immigrated to Canada. She presents the account to her father and he is appalled.
For one thing, he sees no reason to ground his fucked up state in the (possibly non-existent) traumas of his youth. Why, he wonders, is it so hard for Kim to accept that he may have gotten fucked up all on his own? It’s demeaning to be denied responsibility for the mess you’ve made of your life.
For another thing, it’s arrogant. Kim views her writing as an act of empathy:
“And writing in his voice, she understood that Harold was someone else from the inside. In the time it took to truly imagine her father, to inhabit him, language and thought, the anger gave way to something like forgiveness, something she didn’t finally, have words for.”
However, in his answer to his daughter, Harold writes:
“We know only ourselves, and ourselves thinly. What happened to the ruined and the dead? Inside acts of evil, what is witnessed is never what happened. What happened belongs only and always to the victims. If we acknowledge this solemnly, we won’t live in ignorance, and we won’t make the mistake of thinking we can pretend our way into knowing.”
This sets off ironies and paradoxes. Chief among the ironies is the fact that the person Harold addresses is herself a victim recovering from traumatic experience who copes with her real experience, not by telling the events which belong only to her (because trauma keeps her from knowing all the facts), but by inventing them. Harold runs to the other extreme. Although he stood as a witness to Pinochet’s coup, he retreats to statistics and the dispassionate view of a “scientific” history. But Harold Lystrander is no Herodotus. His scruples about the integrity of the victim’s story come off sounding like evasions. As his colleague, Father André Rowe, observes: his book on Central American Protestantism “reads like a smart market analysis.” He goes on to suggest that “[t]here should be room for testaments.” It isn’t surprising that it should be a priest who points to the paradox of solidarity. If the object of solidarity is to speak for those without a voice, then perhaps concessions must be made to the truth. Otherwise the witness acts in the service of power and ends up supporting greater lies. The role of witness is inevitably fraught with moral ambiguity and the challenge of meeting this ambiguity is compounded by the fact that witnesses rarely have a choice in their role.
Harold Lystrander does not sit well in his place of ambiguity, and in his anger and frustration, he commits an act which liberation theologians might describe as lateral oppression or which analysts might call displaced rage. Although he has no evidence to support his conclusion, he is convinced that his daughter’s assailant is a client of a refugee advocacy group for which his daughter volunteered. Through Father André, he meets Rosemary Yates, a woman well-connected in Toronto’s underground network of illegal aliens. Unlike Harold, Rosemary is comfortable in her place of ambiguity and handles only difficult cases: refugee claimants who served in the military or acted as enforcers for drug cartels, people who perhaps grew a conscience or simply wanted to escape a life of violence.
As one would expect, Rosemary has no information to offer. Nevertheless, Harold latches onto her, even asking her out, although she rebuffs him. He stalks her and discovers that she is harbouring an illegal. There’s a hint that she and her charge may be lovers. Motivated by jealousy or by feelings of impotence or simply because he’s pig-headed, Harold confronts the man and goads him until he finds himself on the receiving end of an assault. This lends the novel a neat symmetry. The inevitable happens. The man is deported, possibly to conditions not unlike those Harold witnessed in Santiago in 1973.
With Cities of Refuge, Michael Helm has created a beautiful novel. His characters are fully realized, rich with nuance and ambiguity. The novel engages us in serious issues like the interplay of history, truth and story, and the ethical demands of each, and he accomplishes this without being preachy or didactic. This is not a great novel. I reserve that adjective for works like Midnight’s Children and Under The Volcano. But it is a very good novel — as fine as anything yet written by a Canadian author. And I would hazard to guess that, based on the evidence before us, if we are patient, Helm will deliver something great.