The Time In Between: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: morning ada, cyclo driver, blind boy, Dang Tho, Elaine Gouds, North Vietnamese (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Asking Ellen DeGeneres–sound-alike Anna Fields to narrate this haunting novel of a veteran who goes missing while revisiting Vietnam to make peace with the atrocities he witnessed and committed doesn't initially sound like an inspired idea. However, Fields's narration of this Scotia Bank Giller Prize–winning book (Canada's highest book award) really works. With more than 200 audiobooks to her credit, Fields (aka Kate Fleming, and an Audie Award winner) has a master's touch, and her restrained delivery melds perfectly with Bergen's spare and Hemingwayesque text. Her deadpan delivery works for the narrator's voice as well as it does for Ada Boatman, who travels to Vietnam to find her veteran father, Charles. Fields's only weak note is the voice she uses for the taciturn Charles. As the book shifts between Ada's and Charles's points of view, Field's expertise becomes apparent, especially in her meticulous attention to detail, such as the correct pronunciation of the copious Vietnamese phrases and places in this tale. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 31). (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post

Last month David Bergen won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the Giller Prize (worth about $34,000), for this profoundly sad novel, The Time In Between. Written in a tightly controlled monotone that strives constantly for dramatic effect, it depicts the far-reaching emotional damage suffered by a Vietnam vet and his family. Bergen's ability to dramatize trauma-induced disaffection is undeniable; whether readers will want to sink down that hole with his characters is less clear.

Haunted for 30 years by the atrocities he witnessed and committed, Charles Boatman leaves his remote home in the Pacific Northwest and returns to Vietnam in hopes of gaining some understanding of what happened to him as a young soldier. He's motivated -- to the extent he manages to generate any motivation in the grip of his stultifying depression -- by a North Vietnamese novel about the war that bears a striking similarity to his own experience in combat. After a few weeks of drifting about Danang, talking with local writers and artists and particularly an American missionary and his wife, Charles disappears.

Two of his adult children, Ada and Jon, fly to Vietnam to search for him by retracing his steps, speaking with the people he met and even reading the Vietnamese novel that moved him. In fact, Bergen has created a 15-page "excerpt" of that book and dropped it into The Time In Between in a daring bit of ventriloquism that provides the novel's most affecting scenes. This would have been more impressive, though, if the "excerpt" didn't sound so similar to Bergen's distinctive style, and, in any case, it has the unfortunate effect of making the rest of his novel seem even more motionless by comparison.

Once Charles disappears, the story turns completely to Ada's deeply troubled soul as she drifts around this foreign land, alternately assisted and annoyed by a 14-year-old huckster. Frequently abandoned by her brother and unable to wrest any information from the local authorities about her father, she slides between nostalgia and loneliness. The Vietnamese people she meets are kind but alien, given to orphic pronouncements that will do nothing to disturb the stalest Western cliches about those inscrutable Orientals. Ada realizes eventually -- long after we do -- that she will have no more success than her father in finding what she needs here.

Bergen conveys all this in severely austere prose that some will find haunting and luminous, but to me seemed passive-aggressive -- a narrative voice that insists on our attention by speaking too softly and refusing to provide almost any discernible forward momentum. Kent Haruf's Colorado novels risk that charge, too, but his work offers a kind of spiritual depth that accrues through one deceptively plain sentence after another. By contrast, The Time In Between begins with a heavy sense of dislocation and despair and lets it curdle for 230 pages.

Then there's the problem of the butterfly. Consider this typical scene in which Ada and her Vietnamese lover share big thoughts between dramatic silences:

"Vu lit a cigarette. He did not speak.

"They drank warm beer and watched the sun set. It went down orange and then red. Beyond the palm trees in the courtyard, down the lane, Ada saw a woman riding a bicycle, her back straight, one arm steady at her side. Vu said that it was important to live without hate and bitterness and fear. 'This is possible,' he said. In the dusk, a butterfly passed."

A butterfly passed? Really? Then why doesn't it look like an insect instead of like a literary ornament of random detail? But that's Bergen's modus operandi: stark, dislocated observations to denote great suffering and disaffection. You think I'm swatting too hard at this little bug, but who's that straight-backed, steady-armed woman riding a bicycle? Forget it: She's just another butterfly pinned to the canvas of this self-consciously lethargic novel.

The Time In Between is just that: a series of momentous pauses between events in which desperately lonely people stare off at apparently random scenes and utter short, weighty observations. And once you notice Bergen's technique, instead of watching him soar, all you can see are the wires. Consider this Hemingwayesque moment in which Charles drops by the home of an American missionary and his wife:

"One Friday, late afternoon, he called on the family and she was alone; Jack had taken the children to the roller rink. She was on the balcony, sitting in her usual chair. Her bare legs, the half full glass of wine, the magazine in her lap -- he noted and found pleasure in these things. She'd cut her hair. He mentioned this.

" 'Do you like it? Sort of flapper.'

"It was. The bangs highlighted her green eyes. He nodded and sat. He said that he was lost."

There it is again: that deliberate fusion of the banal and the profound, and it keeps up, paragraph after paragraph, as characters pause, stare, sleep and utter muffled cries. The depressed will find no solace here, others only despair. In representing loneliness and disaffection, Bergen has succeeded all too well.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (November 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812972473
• ISBN-13: 978-0812972474
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,018,254 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 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

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Time In Between: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An insightful journey to nowhere in particular, January 14, 2007

By	Mark Borzillo "bjrpkr" (Hermann, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Time In Between: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great journey, January 11, 2006

By	selffate "invigorating genius" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time In Between: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.