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Between Mountains

by Maggie Helwig

When trying for that perfect pitch of tragedy, it helps to set a romance against one of the great social tremors, whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the fall of Saigon, or the Vancouver Canucks’ loss in the 1994 Stanley Cup final. To say simply that Maggie Helwig’s second novel is “set against the backdrop of the Balkan wars” would be doing it an injustice.

Helwig achieves a rare weave with Between Mountains. The novel’s actions are stitched right into the turmoil and made inseparable, making the whole work move with an authenticity that rarely surfaces in love stories. The only problem with being too good at depicting the surrounding events is that the weight and human tragedy of the Balkans often threatens to overshadow the affair.

Three main players are involved. Daniel is a journalist who has remained in Bosnia for 10 years, still filing stories while the rest of the world’s war reporters have long since moved on. He meets a Serbian-Albanian translator named Lili in Paris in December 1995, at a point in time Helwig calls “the end of the wars, or at least some of the wars.” Their furtive e-mails soon turn into phone calls. Daniel can pronounce her full name, even getting the ‘lj’ sound of Liljana correct. She knows how to calm him when he calls from a particularly active war zone. Rounding out the principals is Nicola Markovic, a Bosnian Serb official being held at the Hague, whose trial will bring the lives of all three together.

There’s always something exciting about the promise of two extraordinarily dysfunctional people falling in love, especially when both are encased in careers that offer little time for the effortless romance that usually happens in the confines of a love story. Helwig’s book is the opposite of those novels where the characters have money and plenty of time, while only the vaguest mention is made of their professions. For these two, jobs are the only structures that give their lives shape.

An unexpected pleasure are the sections on translation. Leave it to the author of seven volumes of poetry to describe the act of changing languages so that it seems as dangerous and thrilling as the work of a California firefighter, with twice as many split-second decisions. Sitting above the courtroom in her booth, Lili builds meaning at a breathless pace, shifting delicate ideas from Serbian to English to French. In her world, translation will always seek but never attain perfection.

There may be a thrill in interpretation, but life is just sheer survival for a journalist in the Balkans. Daniel knows to cut the lights when driving through the worst parts of the city and to seek a doorway when the bombs start falling. He moves at ease through a city at war. After years of sniper fire, bad dreams, and even worse coffee, living in a peaceful city is the more frightening proposition.

But staying true to their jobs sometimes outweighs the importance of being loved. These are two people who have been witness to so much of the world’s pain that even the shreds of physical intimacy Helwig allows them are taken with guilt. Helwig’s language throughout is poetic without slipping too far into the realm of needless ornamentation. She tries to answer the big questions with the particulars of the Balkans. Can a love feel this good when there is so much bad happening elsewhere?

Most love stories pitched against the backdrop of tragic social change rely on actions to tear the lovers apart. Helwig must be aware of this; at one point Daniel even listens to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in his car. For Lili and himself, the song could be recast as “Love Will Wear Us Down Until Romance Is Unfeasible.”

But in Between Mountains, the conflict itself is less a barrier to romance than the protocol of the Hague court. It’s simply too dangerous for Lili to know a journalist intimately. Too much of her career is rooted in truth and confidentiality, and she has learned how much damage loose talk can do.

Helwig is right not to give the story a Hollywood spin. Romance, Helwig knows, must fail to make this a true love story, but the failure here feels like a tired shrug. The feeling that rises up is that these two should fight harder for each other. Instead we get a violent ending that feels unsatisfying for any kind of love story, but perhaps fitting for a novel about the Balkans. Things are left uncertain between Lili and Daniel, with the hope of some sort of reconciliation lingering . There’s a yearning for further contact, for resolution, but also a reminder that most likely it’s just more pain ahead.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 336 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97628-X

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2004-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels