The video shows a distant group of a few dozen people trudging in a file up a steep, snow-covered mountainside. A blurry figure on the ridge levels an invisible rifle. There are popping sounds. “They're shooting them like dogs!” an off-camera voice exclaims. One of the lead figures in the advancing column collapses into the snow, dead.
Thus ended the so-called Nangpa La incident, named for the high pass in the Himalaya mountains where it occurred in 2006. Chinese border guards shot several unarmed Tibetan refugees attempting to flee the country into Nepal, rounded up the survivors and packed them off to prison, where most remain today.
But what's this? A lone figure tumbles down the ridge out of Nepal and toward the body crumpled in the snow on the Chinese side of the border. The rifles keep popping as the intervenor kneels to aid the dying refugee. Another figure rushes down the ridge into China, video camera rolling. There is chaos in the snow as the border guards close in on the floundering Tibetans – along with the terrified Canadians who have rushed impetuously into the melee.
Thus begins Steven Heighton's latest novel, Every Lost Country. What follows is a hell-bent adventure that transforms an obscure outbreak of geopolitical ugliness into a universal moral drama – like a Lord Jim for the 21st century, but told with the pace of the slickest modern thriller. Expanding the scant facts into more-than-credible fiction, the author exposes hard truths that remain invisible in the YouTube abstraction of the documented event.
It's no sin to tell a good story — Steven Heighton
There is no romance in Heighton's Tibet, no pure heroes or villains among the broad range of vividly drawn characters that inhabit it, and no easy answers to the questions raised by their often blundering, sometimes violent actions. Nor is it remote. Linked by satellite and documented by video, this Tibet is wholly here and now, a moral abyss equally capable of swallowing both sympathetic Westerners and Communist Party hardliners: A lost horizon become lost country in a world of the lost – one that is inescapably our own.
And what a surprise from Heighton, 48, a writer's writer and poet of pronounced literary bent, one who has always seemed content to live and work with lofty disregard for the mass market, “hiding out” in Kingston, Ont., with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. With Every Lost Country, he not only succumbs to the modern taste for non-stop action, he masters it.
It's a conscious departure, Heighton acknowledged in a recent interview in Toronto, having emerged briefly from his home on “Writer's Block” near Kingston's Skeleton Park to promote both Every Lost Country and a book of poetry, Patient Frame, published just last month.
“I used to be more of a purist about literature,” he said. “I thought, if it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.” His first novel, The Shadow Boxer, “had very much an art-for-art's-sake tone.” Afterlands, his second, achieved enormous critical success internationally with its intense story of Arctic explorers stranded on a melting ice floe. But it was “a little dense,” according to Heighton. “It had a dreamlike quality that slowed it down.”
By contrast, Every Lost Country was conceived from the beginning to be fast-paced, clear and hard-hitting.
“It's no sin to tell a good story,” Heighton declared, purist no more. Nor is it slumming for a serious artist to be overtly political. “I don't see literature as being over here and then, on the other side of the table, there's engaged political commentary,” he said.
Even so, he'd rather not hear Every Lost Country described as a political thriller – or indeed lumped into any category. “I wanted it to be a literary novel in terms of the conscientiousness of the actual writing, the complications and contradictions of the characters,” he said. “I wanted them to be difficult, contradictory people – like real people.”
That they are. “The Chinese characters are not all bad guys by any means, and the Tibetan characters are not all good guys,” Heighton said. “And as for the Western characters, they're all over the map.”
What sets the novel far above the thriller norm is the diversity of the viewpoints it incorporates, blended invisibly into the heart-pounding narrative by means of constant small miracles of characterization.
“It gets too easy to write from the point of view of a male character of my age, with the same cultural frame of reference,” Heighton said. “So I decided to stretch myself aesthetically by writing from the points of view of characters who are totally different from me.”
That's the kind of challenge that keeps him excited, he added. “In the end, I feel I got where I wanted to go.”Readers who decide to follow along will experience a fast and often harrowing ride. But be warned: Once embarked, there is no escape.
