The Irish Times - Saturday, February 11, 2012
ANNA CAREY
FICITION: Dogs at the Perimeter By Madeleine Thien, Granta, 253pp. £14.99
A CHILD ESCAPES a terrifying conflict zone and is taken into safety, where she finds a loving and secure new home. It should be a happy ending: the scary past is behind her; a bright new future beckons. But, as Madeleine Thien’s powerful new novel reminds us, leaving the past behind is rarely simple. Dogs at the Perimeter is the story of Janie, a neuroscientist in Montreal. In 1975, when she was 11, Janie and her family were forced from their middle-class home in Phnom Penh and moved to a labour group in the countryside, where they experienced hideous hardship and brutality.
More than three decades later, Janie’s friend and colleague Hiroji disappears, and she is overwhelmed by her memories of loss and terror. When she finds herself taking out her frustration on her beloved son, Kiri, she leaves him and her bewildered husband, Navin, and moves into Hiroji’s abandoned apartment. The key to the latter’s disappearance seems to lie in the fact that he too lost someone in Cambodia – his brother James, a doctor who went there in the 1970s to work for the Red Cross and never came back.
In the Khmer Rouge’s nightmarish Cambodia, names and identities became fluid. Pol Pot’s regime declared that 1975 was Year Zero, and, as teachers and intellectuals were tortured and murdered, the country’s history was supposedly erased. In Dogs at the Perimeter, several characters are renamed and reborn, sometimes involuntarily. While working in the fields, Janie is renamed Mei; when she eventually reaches Canada, she adopts Janie as her “Canadian name”, telling her foster mother she wants “a new name, a new existence”.
Her brother, Sopham, gives himself a new name and family history, then manages to escape the interrogation centre where he works after he is mistaken for a torture victim’s son. And Hiroji’s brother, who started life as Junichiro before changing his name to James, has a new name and history pushed upon him by a Cambodian would-be saviour.
This sense of instability, of a world where nothing stays the same for long, is reflected in the book’s narrative structure. The story jumps back and forth between Janie, Hiroji and James, their pasts and their presents, and even their dreams. This evokes the confusing and unstable world in which the characters live, but the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction can be frustrating.
As can Thien’s often beautiful but sometimes wilfully oblique prose. Her writing is at its most arresting when she describes Janie’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge and the Angkar, Cambodia’s secretive supreme authority. The bewildering horror of ordinary people suddenly thrown into a world of brutal chaos is brilliantly evoked, as the starving family are forced to toil in the fields and “everybody’s hands bled because we were city people”. The sick are sent to a makeshift hospital where the “doctors” are children; in one chilling moment, Janie realises that the boy “treating” her mother can’t even read.
The story of her and her brother’s attempts to find each other and flee the country is as gripping as any thriller. Thien brilliantly evokes 1970s Cambodia, from the chaos of Phnom Penh to the sweltering, filthy work camps, from the interrogation centres to the lush forests. But she’s equally adept at bringing cold, clean Montreal to life, from its icy streets to Hiroji’s abandoned apartment.
In Janie’s world, memory can be both a blessing and a curse. She’s haunted by the horrors of her past, but her memories also allow her to retain a connection with her parents, brother and homeland. While drifting on the ocean after the boat in which she has escaped from Cambodia is attacked, the young Janie wonders if you can regain what is lost by wanting it enough, by being brave enough: “Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear.” In a way, her memory manages to ensure that this is true, but it comes at a terrible cost, as she struggles constantly to be free of her history.
At the heart of the book are the ideas of family and the bonds that connect us to each other. Some of the characters push their families away as a defensive measure; some will risk anything, even their own lives, to be reunited with lost parents or siblings; some are haunted by guilt and memories of relatives they couldn’t save. But despite all the pain that families can bring, Thien seems to suggest that holding on to those bonds is ultimately the only way to survive. Her novel leaves the reader deeply moved and, ultimately, hopeful.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca (the O’Brien Press), won the Children’s Book of the Year (Senior) award at the 2011 Irish Book Awards
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