This book was an accidental purchase. When I read last year about the death of Canadian poet and writer Steven Heighton, including a few moving elegies about his impact on CanLit, I ordered two books of his poetry. Or so I thought. This book is a novel, and I found the premise intriguing. Plus, I often love novels by poets for their lyrical, evocative, and spare prose. While I enjoyed this novel a lot, it was neither lyrical nor spare, but definitely evocative, engaging, and captured my attention entirely.
The novel brings together several contemporary backgrounds and locations. The main character, Elias, is a Canadian with Greek heritage, a soldier in Afghanistan in 2017. During a routine sortie, there is some miscommunication with catastrophic results, and he is demobbed to Cyprus where he stays with some relatives and gets treatment for his trauma. After another violent episode on a beach near the Turkish border, Elias finds himself marooned in Varosha, a former resort town abandoned and in limbo since 1974. But not entirely abandoned, for there is a small group of refugees living in the ruins, in what they call the village. In this desolate space, where time has both stood still – with the things left behind when it was evacuated – and moved on – as the buildings crumble around them – Elias finds a short-lived measure of peace with this unlikely family.
The book is described as a thriller, but it is too slow-paced for that, and there is little mystery about how it will end, only about when. The villains are clear, and the situations so tenuous that the greater mystery is how they have lasted as long as they have. But, there is still an element of suspense as we keep expecting the worst and it keeps getting delayed. When the end finally comes, it is well crafted and pleasant. Along the way, we meet several complex and believable characters; even the villain is somewhat sympathetic and understandable.
The division of Cyprus in 1974, following the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island, is a little known but long-standing separation that has no end in sight. The Green Zone, a UN buffer zone, is the DMZ between north and south. At the Eastern end of this line is the decaying Varosha; previously off-limits to visitors, it was opened to civilians in 2017 (I’m guessing that’s when Heighton would have learned of it). It’s a desolate setting for a story about someone finding peace and hope, but it works well as the fleeting refuge for Elias to get past his nightmares.
I really enjoyed this book, and so will check out more of Heighton’s writing, poetry and novels included.
Fate: I’ll pass this along to another reader.
1 – a book with a murder
13 – set somewhere I’ve never been
25 – new author to me
33 – Canadian author
rclr 