Dep of darkness

>> Montreal neurologist Liam Durcan writes
about a depanneur owner with a tortured
past in García’s Heart

by JULIET WATERS

Liam Durcan does a lot of serious thinking. You might guess this just by looking at his craggy, interesting face, even if you didn’t already know that the Montreal neurologist was also a novelist. García’s Heart, about a Honduran doctor on trial for his involvement in U.S.-sanctioned torture during the ’80s, is told from the point of view of a Montreal neuroscientist. Patrick Lazerenko once had a father-son relationship with Hervé García. As a teenager, Lazerenko worked at the NDG Depanneur García owned before he was recognized by a former victim. Now, Lazerenko finds himself obsessively probing those murky areas of life where well-intentioned or ill-considered compromises are the first small steps in a tragic trajectory. On break from a clinic at the Montreal General, Durcan took some time to talk about his work.

Mirror: On top of being a specialist, you’re the father of two young kids. What drives you to find the time to write?

Liam Durcan: I don’t know if it’s a reaction to medicine. Someone was asking me about neurology and what that was like and it’s pretty reductive. You’re always looking for a material explanation for what’s going on and I was trying to ask myself if writing is something more synthetic, trying to put things together. I would hate to think it was just an escape.

M: Chekhov [who was also a doctor] wrote once about the responsibility of writers to honestly declare how little can be known about the world. There’s so much pressure on doctors to know as much as possible. Is writing a space for you to admit what you don’t know?

LD: I’ve thought a lot about that recently just because I’ve been thinking about prognostication and how doctors use it in various ways to control anxiety about the future and to try to get everybody to come to some kind of consensus... There is that diagnostic uncertainty, and it plagues us, and I think with neurologists we’re not allowed hubris as much as, perhaps, other doctors are. The nervous system is just overwhelming, and sometimes we’re wrong even when we use the best information... So I think neurologists are a little more open to admitting what they don’t know.

M: What got you interested in Honduras?

LD: After I read The Nazi Doctors [by Robert Jay Lifton], I remember wanting to write about ethical compromises and the nuances of that. When you think about a setting, I think it’s natural to think about the Holocaust. But I always felt that if it wasn’t done in almost a documentary style that people were trying to exploit it in a way. I’d always been interested in Latin American politics. But again, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, they’d all been written about a lot. I didn’t have a great idea of what was going on in Honduras. I started reading about it and I became fascinated with the change between the Reagan administration and the Carter administration, and that huge change in attitude toward human rights abuses.

Then I started doing research based on articles written in The Baltimore Sun in the ’90s, and they were talking about people who had been involved in Battalion 316 [where the most notorious torture was done] and who were now living here in Ottawa and Toronto. They’d found people who had assumed fairly normal lives. So I wanted to show how a situation like that can entrap a lot of people who wouldn’t be involved in unethical behaviour. In the end, I found myself more interested in Honduras. I’ve never been, but I definitely want to go now.

García’s Heart by Liam Durcan. M&S, hc., 380pp. $32.99 Liam Durcan will launch García’s Heart at the Blue Metropolis Festival, Saturday, April 28, 1:30 p.m. Durcan will also be on a panel with Heather O’Neill, Neil Smith and Rawi Hage discussing The Spirit of Montreal, Sunday, April 29, 2:30 p.m. For details, visit www.bluemetropolis.org/ festival.