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Butterfly Lovers

by Charles Foran

As a travel writer and journalist, Charles Foran is drawn to embattled settings, places where politics and history impinge on the lives of ordinary people. Northern Ireland’s troubles were at the heart of The Last House of Ulster, for which Foran received a 1995 nomination for the Governor General’s Award for English nonfiction. An earlier work, Sketches in Winter, explored the human context of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre.

Now there is Foran’s second novel, Butterfly Lovers, set in both post-Tiananmen Beijing, and pre-referenda Montreal. With its operatic title, readers might well expect a doomed cross-cultural affair against a repressive political backdrop. Butterfly Lovers does come to this, but is for the most part a meditation on accepting the imperfect self: reflecting on loss, moving beyond failure, and discovering what is left to give others after the cocoon of the past has been shed.

The caterpillar in question is David LeClair, a 34 year-old ex-Marxist academic who takes a job as an English instructor in a Beijing school. David’s life in Montreal is stagnant and full of unreconcilable breaches: he is no comfort to his best friend, who is ill with AIDS; he is increasingly distanced from his ex-wife and their tiny daughter; his mother, a leftist activist, seems to have no time for him; and the frigid Christmas of ’89 strands him alone in his desolate Mile End flat. Beijing represents a chance for David to leave behind his insufficiencies, and to develop a new and improved persona – brave, moral, strong, active. Predictably, Beijing has its own plans for David.

Foran has written a sophisticated novel, engaged with some of the central thematic obsessions of our time: identity and language, self and community, desire and loss, immigration and nationality. The prose is engagingly quick-witted, and the story very much grounded in event and behaviour. David may be written in a contemplative mode, but there are many voices to challenge his views.

The Montreal half of the book is obviously written from the heart. The immigrant, working-class neighbourhood of Mile End – caught between the French and English ends of the city, much like fluently bilingual David – is rendered in all its funky, nicotine-hazed incongruity. But with the shift to Beijing, the narrative becomes more coolly observational and programmatic, as if Foran the journalist usurps Foran the storyteller: the love story of the title seems especially self-conscious. Yet in spite of these late-blooming flaws, the novel is an ambitious success. Through its courageous and eloquent characters, Butterfly Lovers argues that individual diversity and cultural impurity are cause for celebration, not condemnation. In the cynical ’90s, in a world of shifting borders, this is a viewpoint that needs all the support it can get.

 

Reviewer: Lisa Godfrey

Publisher: HarperCollins

DETAILS

Price: $27

Page Count: 320 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-224390-3

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: 1996-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels