10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"His love for you is like weight that you have to carry", February 13, 2006
Charles Boatman has spent most of his life haunted by the chaos of the Vietnam War. Enlisting at twenty, but having no real desire to fight, Charles, after almost three decades, is still struggling to win his own private war of salvation. Upon his return from the battle zone, he moves to the isolated mountains of British Columbia, Canada where he builds a home and raises his three children, his eldest daughter Ada, and the twins, Jon and Del, intent to eke out a life living of the land, whilst trying to suppress the demons of his past.
Plagued by nightmares and dreams, the ghosts of the murdered, Charles can never quite exorcise the bloody images of battle, particularly the senseless killing of a young Vietnamese boy on the Han River, whom he shot in a moment of fear. With the exodus of his children, leaving to making their own lives for themselves, Charles feels ancient and unmoored, so on the spur of the moment, he books a ticket to Vietnam, and then cancels it, unsure of what he will find if he goes.
When an old war colleague lends him a book written by a North Vietnamese soldier, Charles is immediately drawn to this young man's harrowing story of survival; the author's brooding photograph and the sadness that seems to hover around and above him intriguing Charles. The story provides Charles' final catalysis, opening up a kinship with something, awakening of the moral forces that have so overwhelmed him. Twenty-eight years after leaving Vietnam as a young soldier, Charles decides to make the return trip, returning to a country that has had such a profound effect on his life.
Charles rebooks a ticket to Hanoi, thinking that in some way he might conclude an event in his life that has consumed and shaped him. However, upon his arrival this aging war veteran abruptly vanishes. It is left to his children, Ada and Jon to pick up the pieces, to travel to Vietnam, to this "perplexing and alien place, where the language was more beautiful because they could not understand it," to find and perhaps recover their missing father.
Whilst Jon travels, seeking out the distraction of men, Ada is left in DaNang, trying to make sense of Charles' story. She meets an officious and unhelpful police inspector, who tells her that her father remains missing, and falls into the company of ex-pat American missionary Jack Doud, and his distracted, inattentive wife, Elaine, both had met Charles, even had dinner with him, and remembered that he had told them he felt "lost." Eventually Ada finds solace in the arms of a Hoang Vu, a disconsolate Vietnamese artist, who has survived the war and survived the hard times after the war, but continues to be plagued by his own ghosts.
A letter found in her father's bag gives Ada a sign that she so desperately needs; it's as though she is connected to her father as his voice lifts and falls away, the message tells of him looking out over the harbor of DaNang and contemplating, with great peace, his own death. Wracked by the guilt and pain, Charles wonders how he can take away the pain of the random shedding of innocent blood.
Charles imagined that by coming back to this place and solving some mystery that he would understand what had happened to him, but although the streets were the same, it was just not the same place, as everything else has vanished. Both father and daughter ache for a connection: Ada thinks about the future and the past and how she feels so detached, whilst Charles ponders the "light and shade" that falls across his own memories, a whole history arriving with absolute clarity and then disappearing.
Bergen writes beautifully of time and place, the story dreamlike, and poetic, espousing the universal themes of love, death, and mourning, as the author transports the reader to this striking and foreign landscape, where western values are seen as an anathema, and where exotic sights, sounds and smells dominate: a man leaning over a pool table, a child crying beside a chicken; a woman sleeping beside her jewelry shop, a boy being beaten by a stick, a man and a fridge on a bicycle.
Bergen offers no easy answers to the chaotic after-effects of war and the journey towards emotional healing, yet he shows how lives can often slip away, undiscovered. His characters "set sail in a particular direction, certain of the route," and then find themselves loose and set adrift. Charles remains paralyzed by his past actions, caught in an emotional dilemma not of his own making. Ada, wise and intelligent beyond her years, aches for her father, the man she has loved more than anyone. Both are wandering, helpless, through a quagmire of painful feelings, hoping against hope, fumbling toward a resolution that often seems impossible. Mike Leonard February 06.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great journey, January 11, 2006
Bergen has managed to take a story and tell it in a simple fashion with complicated characters that you want to keep learning more about.
The more you read the Time in Between, you realise it isn't about the location(s) it takes place in, or the background of the characters, but how you want to find yourself lost in this world where Charles, his children, and other side characters are meandering.
So much of what I have read of late is just hackneyed stock characters going through the motions. It was so pleasing to see real people for once in a novel, who are searching for something inside themselves, instead of just running from scene to scene to plod the story along.
There is nothing here that is also too heavy. From the notes here on Amazon you can already see it is about a former Vietnam Vet, but the book isn't about the war or Charles problems dealing with it. Part of the book takes place in Canada, but that location has nothing to do with the events that take place, the kids could have grown up anywhere. So don't be put off from the fact that Vietnam and Canada are mentioned, you don't have to be familiar with these places to understand the novel, let alone the Vietnam war.
The climax of the novel comes towards the middle if you haven't forseen it already, but Bergen makes you want to keep on reading. There is only the universal theme of moving on with life and the people who you meet along the way, perhaps it is truly "the time in between" that matters. Great read.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An insightful journey to nowhere in particular, January 14, 2007
The thought-provoking title and liner notes filled me with anticipation as I starting into this book. The writer's style is straight-forward and vivid. He does an ample job of eliciting the characters' feelings and painting layered pictures of their surroundings. However, as the story progressed, I kept expecting to see some lines connect. Charles' eventual suicide, while somewhat expected, appeared almost arbitrary. His inner thoughts were never quite revealed, but maybe that was intended.
Bit characters like Yin (sic) appeared again and again but why? There was never any point to him. I kept expecting him to have some important piece in this puzzle of a tale.
Wan voh (sic) is portrayed as some sort of thoughtful Bhudda-like character, full of wisdom and few words. But he seems more of an aimless alcoholic. And what of the demons he was hiding? We never glimpse much. There was much more character development that could been done, more tied together with the other characters for more cohesiveness.
And the end!? Well it like being sucker punched, all the wind knocked out of you. I'm left asking what is the point of this book? If it is to protray several people's hopelessness and sadness, well I guess it did that. I guess I don't like sitting around hitting my thumb with a hammer either. I think Mr. Bergen could spend a few weeks out in the woods or at least ask his doctor for a different prescription. I'll never read another of this guy's books.
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