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  • Fiction
  • Lisa Salem-Wiseman (bio)

First Fiction

While writing an omnibus review of established fiction can be compared to spending the summer catching up with old friends, reviewing first fiction is like sharing a cottage with thirty-five strangers. While the former provides a chance for re-acquaintance and reassurance – so nice to see that so-and-so is living up to her earlier promise; too bad that such-and-such missed the mark with his latest effort – the latter is a leap into the unknown. One could be forging new and fruitful relationships, but one could just as easily be setting oneself up for a summer of boredom and frustration. So it was with some trepidation that I opened the first box of books that arrived and began to flip through the unknown quantities contained therein. The authors who published their first fiction in 2007 make up a diverse group, ranging in age from twenty-three to eighty-seven. Some have published collections of poetry; some have published stories in journals; some have never written anything before; some have established careers in fields such as medicine, social work, and education. The books themselves are equally diverse, encompassing a broad range of settings, themes, voices, concerns, and styles.

García’s Heart, the first novel by neurologist Liam Durcan, is a thought-provoking, gripping, and beautifully written exploration of moral complicity and obligation that marks its author as an important emerging voice in Canadian literature. Several chapters into this astonishingly assured debut, the protagonist, Patrick Lazerenko, reveals his recent obsession with a moral dilemma: [End Page 1]

The village has been captured by enemy soldiers with orders to kill all civilians. A group of townspeople have sought refuge in the hayloft of an abandoned barn. They can hear the soldiers outside; the soldiers are coming toward the barn. At that moment, a woman’s infant daughter begins to cry. She covers the child’s mouth to block the sound. If she removes her hand from the child’s mouth, the soldiers will be alerted and will kill the woman, her child, and all the townspeople. To save herself and the others, she must kill her child.

This problem, known as ‘the crying baby dilemma’ casts echoes throughout the novel, which deals intelligently and provocatively with the conflict between group welfare and personal moral conviction. Patrick is a neurologist who has become a glorified marketing executive; his company, Neuronaut, advises companies about marketing decisions based on neurological data. He has moral qualms about at least one of their clients, the monster corporation Globomart, which has a reputation for ‘bare-knuckling across the American business landscape’ and treating its competitors ‘as Genghis Khan treated his enemies.’

Patrick flees from this moral dilemma, only to land in an even more serious one; he travels voluntarily to The Hague to attend the war crimes trial of his former mentor and father figure, Hernan García, a former cardiologist who is charged with participating in the torture of subversives undergoing interrogation in Honduras. Haunted by the similarities between himself and one of García’s alleged victims, Patrick combs through his memory looking for clues to García’s guilt or innocence. Was García treating patients illegally in the back bedrooms of his family home? If so, were his actions more harmful than helpful? If García is guilty of facilitating torture, were his actions somehow justified? Is there ever a situation in which one can say that an act of cruelty is ‘defensible and understandable and unavoidable’? Patrick must decide whether the greater good will be served by leaving García to face the consequences of his actions or by putting his own career at risk to help his former mentor.

The question of how much we will sacrifice or endure for the sake of our careers is a theme that runs through several of the novels and stories published this year. One of the most interesting reflections on this idea can be found in Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage, which looks at the world of Olympic-calibre athletes. The novel follows Sadie, a twenty-six-year-old competitive swimmer, and Digger...

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