Customer Reviews

Every Lost Country

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The 2006 Nangpa La shooting incident in one of the most spectacular mountain regions of the world - the High Himalayas between Nepal and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China - was the impetus for Steven Heighton's richly imagined multifaceted novel about personal dreams and failures, courage, endurance and love. Starting out from the factual episode in which a summit climbing team at the Nepali border observed and filmed a group of Tibetan pilgrims attempting to reach the nearest mountain pass into Nepal, pursued and shot at by Chinese soldiers, the author constructs an action-packed narrative, that is embedded in his first-hand knowledge of the region and the Tibetan culture, and enriched by his philosophical viewpoints.

Canadian author Steven Heighton, known for his much praised earlier novel Afterlands: A Novel, is also an accomplished poet. His beautifully crafted evocative depiction of the regions landscapes, with its stark changes in climate and vistas during day and night time hours, and otherworldly sensations experienced by high altitude mountaineers, provide a strong integrating theme for the novel. The narrator, addressing at the beginning one of the protagonists, a first time climber, tries to find words that rise beyond description: " Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic. Dulling the mind, it dulls distinctions, slurs the border between abstractions - right or wrong - or apparent opposites - dead or alive, past or present [...] this mental twilight is a surprise as rewarding as the scenery."

Several parallel narrative streams, starting out as one, and continuing in two and three alternating strands, and seen from different protagonists' perspectives, eventually overlap and come together again in deeply moving ways. The climb of one of the unconquered Himalayan summits, named Kyatruk in the novel, inspires and challenges the team and, intimately, its leader Wade Lawson. He could not have assembled a more diverse, complex and strong set of individuals for his team, each with distinctive goals for their participation. The reader is completely transposed into the middle of the action. An essential member is Dr. Lewis Book, an experienced "humanitarian doctor". With many years living in and out of crisis zones, he is totally committed to always help the victims in complete disregard for his own safety. Completely in character, he rushes across the border into Tibet to assist those wounded by the shooting and is caught by the Chinese soldiers and marched off together with the captured Tibetan pilgrims and Amaris McRae, the team's Chinese-Canadian photographer who has filmed the attack.

Entirely believable and thoughtfully presented, the author delves into the hard realities of the Tibetan conflict between those who strive to maintain their traditional life and those who see progress in cooperating with the Chinese. Heighton effectively brings out the inner struggles that Lewis and Amaris experience when reassessing their personal convictions. Lewis, especially, is forced by circumstances to question his motives as a doctor and his moral integrity as a human being. Among the Tibetans caught up in the dramatic events of arrest, incarceration and flight, Buddhist nun Choden Lhamu stands out for her serene and wise guidance and counsel. Yet, even she is challenged and shaken in her deeply held beliefs.

"Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic" is taken up later again, only to lead into another major theme in the novel: "It looks, even now, like a sanctuary above all borders and distinctions... " Heighton reinforces his vision of a space beyond borders; it complements his sense of country, a place that is not restrictively delineated as a geographical place. Each protagonist has her or his own understanding, from the small or fractured family to the vastness of a region, from the nostalgia for a past of love to the urge to care for others in crises zones... Lewis, more than the others, ponders his need for home, torn as he is between his vocation as a "crisis doctor" and those he keeps leaving behind: " A family is its own small country and culture and he has been displaced from his [...] But each posting marked him until a part of him was indelibly soiled, a ghost that leaves bloody shoeprints everywhere he goes. Meanwhile his own world felt less and less like a refuge: an alien culture of complacency, ingratitude, the petulant expectation of ever-increasing comfort and plenty. [...] Now, it's only here among the doctorless that he still feels he matters, belongs." Lewis is further being challenged by his troubled daughter Sophana, who is accompanying this expedition. Her emotional growth during this journey's many ordeals is one of the many heartwarming aspects of the novel.

EVERY LOST COUNTRY can be read on different levels, each fascinating in itself, yet each is enriched by the other levels. It is as much a dramatic adventure story, and at times a page-turner, as it is a deeply reflective and lyrical exploration of human nature, our drive to reach our goals, whether they are fame and fortune, or moral integrity, altruism, or serenity and love for others. [Friederike Knabe]

In September 2006, Chinese border guards fired on a number of refugees attempting to leave Tibet by the Nangpa La pass, killing a young nun outright and wounding and capturing some others, while the rest of the party crossed safely into Nepal. The incident was filmed by a photographer attached to a mountaineering expedition encamped at the pass, whose grainy footage was shown around the world, lending support to the Free Tibet movement; it is still available on You Tube. Fascinated with fictional potential of the incident, Canadian author Steven Heighton has used it as the seed for a novel, though inventing new characters, altering details, and adjusting the geography to fit his imagined scenario. He sees Nangpa La, the pass itself, as the border between different worlds. Most obviously between North and South, Chinese-occupied Tibet and Nepal. Also between up and down, represented by the (fictional) unscaled peak Kayatruk rising above the pass that the expedition is trying to climb, and the high desert below containing small oases of habitation. And metaphorically, between outside and inside: how one is defined in terms of nationality or profession, versus what one discovers oneself to be as a human being. Clearly, it is a magnificent challenge.

Heighton has used real events before as triggers for fictional exploration. His 2005 novel AFTERLANDS, for instance, starts from an incident in 1874 when nineteen people survived for over six months on a floating iceberg in the arctic. Perhaps I suffer from having read that too recently, because I tend to take the brilliant originality of the author's mind for granted, and see too clearly the surface similarities between the two books. Both are epics of group survival. Both bring together people of different races and address the political and ethical questions that arise. Both contain domineering figures who are forced to reassess their own qualities (here Wade Lawson, the leader of the expedition to Kayatruk). And both contain at least one relative outsider, an open-minded but basically detached individual who is eventually forced to take sides. The latter characters tend to be the most sympathetic in Heighton's books. Here there are two: the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Amaris McRae, and the expedition doctor Lewis Book, whose humanitarian activities around the world in an organization similar to Doctors Without Borders have caused him to neglect his own family. To compensate, he has brought his teenage daughter Sophie with him on this expedition, a perhaps-improbable decision which nonetheless adds greatly to the range of interest in the novel.

I have done a certain amount of climbing myself (albeit Alpine rather than Himalayan), and much of the book rings strikingly true, especially Heighton's descriptions of life in the cramped quarters of the base camp, and his skill at capturing the psychology of climbing high in adverse conditions. But my small knowledge proved a dangerous thing, and I found myself troubled by certain discrepancies of scale; the very different worlds of oxygen-starved mountain and the fertile valley seemed just too close. I put this down to Heighton's freedom with geography, but I now think he is simply trying to bring too much together in one book. In AFTERLANDS, the characters were held together in the same place for over half the book, and only later go their own ways (the "afterlands" of the title). Here, though, the split occurs the moment the Chinese capture the doctor and filmmaker and take them to lower altitudes. While I found the climbing sequences absolutely riveting, especially at the end, I did not fully see their relevance to the main action taking place below. And even there, Heighton is so prolific with his characters, Canadian, Tibetan, and Chinese, many with their own complicated back-stories, that although he never squanders his readers' sympathies, he risks losing his own focus. This is a clear five-star book, no doubt about it; Heighton is a brilliant and humane writer. But if AFTERLANDS would rate, say, 9 on a 10-point scale, EVERY LOST COUNTRY is only an 8.