In 1970 London, eight-year-old Lydia nestles against her journalist father as they watch the BBC news. Five planes have been hijacked. One defiant perpetrator, a young woman, has been captured, her face now displayed on the TV screen, transfixing Lydia. “She looked beautiful and strange.” While Lydia's mother voices her contempt for the terrorists, her dad demurs: “It's complicated, Lydie. There have been injustices on both sides.”
Cut to Beirut. Schoolgirl Mouna has her own obsession with Rafa Ahmed, the beautiful hijacker. Mouna's mother, like Rafa's, is Palestinian, spurring her to imagine similar tensions in Ahmed's life. Like Lydia, Mouna is beset also by her parents' marital tensions, bad enough in her case that she's sent to live with an aunt and uncle. Back in London, Lydia's father is assigned to a jailhouse interview with Rafa. A few days later, Rafa's negotiated release secures in turn the release of hundreds of hostages from planes baking on a desert airstrip in Jordan.
No Place Strange, by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Key Porter, 327 pages, $27.95
In Beirut, Mouna is encouraged one day to tag along to her Aunt Miriam's university office, where she is introduced to a once-favoured student: Rafa Ahmed. We learn that the professor aunt and the terrorist student disagree on the uses of violence, but share a conviction “that Palestine should be returned to its people.”
Poet and debut novelist Diana Fitzgerald Bryden compresses the above back story into 20 pages, including two excerpts from a book within the book: a biography of Rafa Ahmed that will continue to serve as an intermittent parallel narrative. The complex kick-off is smartly constructed, simmering with suspense.
We're bumped ahead to 1986. Mouna and Lydia are in their early twenties, Lydia's family now settled in Canada. She's leaving her Toronto home for a Greek island sojourn, an escape from the pain of watching her widowed mother ride on the celebrity coattails of the Ahmed bio's author – the worst slap being that Ahmed is thought to be linked to her father's violent death a decade before.
Highly ambitious, this first book is unexpectedly mature in construction and theme
Mouna and family, meanwhile, eke out a crazed existence in what is now the war zone of Beirut, “a blood-soaked demolition site,” where Mouna works with the UN's High Commission for Refugees. As Lydia is due to land in Greece, we meet Mouna's cousin Farid, temporarily in Athens for a somewhat guilty holiday from the warring streets. Bryden has set us up to await the crossing of Lydia's and Farid's paths, further linking the two worlds.
Bryden's third-person narration keeps its distance, making no judgments and sensibly narrowing the points of view to four: Lydia, Mouna, Farid and Mouna's professor aunt, Miriam, Farid's mother. The series of linkages between two widely separated families suggests an author shrewdly manipulating pieces on a story board, but the effect is of a clarifying bird's-eye view. The map of dovetailing plots is a pleasure to read.
There are deeply affecting snapshots of daily life in a war zone, such as when we join Miriam flat on her kitchen floor, avoiding stray shrapnel during a bombardment as she waits for the espresso pot to heat. It boils, then boils over, wasting the precious coffee, forcing her to her feet. She burns her hand dealing with the mess, all the while distracted by a strange noise in the room, “raw and rough.” Then she understands that the noise is her, the apartment “filled with the sound of her weeping.”
Lydia's trip to Greece is a half-conscious quest to resolve the ambiguities of her father's death. She meets Farid in Mykonos, and over a few weeks of sun-drenched pleasure, they fall in love. He's a Lebanese Arab; she's half Jewish. As the story grows in complication, Bryden keeps us firmly on track. The deadlocked enmities of Beirut, and the cynical hypocrisy they breed among outsiders and insiders alike, fuel a volatile love story entwined with a subtle meditation on the roots of terror.
Highly ambitious, this first book is unexpectedly mature in construction and theme. Though Bryden can be overly fussy with quotidian details (of phone calls, air travel, household tasks, driving, shopping) these are at most minor distractions from her real purpose and achievement: the intimate probing of diverse lives beset by grief, love and rage. Her closing pages are equally an opening: a precarious moment of calm and fragile trust, suggesting just enough hope.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
