The Time in Between

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

“The past is a foreign country,” L. Hartley memorably observed;
“they do things differently there.” This moving novel, the fifth by
Winnipeg writer David Bergen, reminds us that Hartley’s observation is
also true of our own pasts. Nearly three decades after serving in
Vietnam and then moving to Canada to raise his three children in the
mountains of British Columbia, Charles Boatman returns to Asia hoping to
“understand what had happened to him. But it was not the same place
… All the inside things, the things felt when he was an
eighteen-year-old, [were] gone.” When no word from him reaches Canada,
his 28-year-old daughter and her younger brother fly to Hanoi to search
for him. This novel tells their story and, in flashback, that of their
father.

Bergen spent considerable time in Vietnam and the local colour is
richly drawn. His engrossing narrative and straightforward
Hemingway-esque prose style by themselves commend this fine novel, but
its themes linger in mind long after one has read it. As the daughter
moves through the expatriate community in Vietnam—a group described by
one Vietnamese as “a soup of bewildered souls”—she learns more
about her father than her close relationship with him had ever revealed
as she was growing up, and we are reminded that the horrors of war alter
the lives not only of those who experience them but of subsequent
generations as well. When “her father’s darkness had come to settle
in some small way on her own heart,” she learns a cruel and universal
truth: she thought she had understood her father’s sadness but it was
something that she “could not now, nor ever, comprehend.”