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Murder on high
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It’s hard to resist the pull of the opening paragraph of Every Lost Country. Best known for his internationally successful novels The Shadow Boxer and Afterlands, Steven Heighton writes with enough lucid authority to lull any reader into a pleasant hypnotic state. So when the characters first hear the gunshots that will soon spin their lives into a decidedly non-mystical direction, it’s easy to imagine these sounding very much like “someone stepping on bubble wrap.” The novel is based on the Nangpa La shooting incident in 2006, when a group of Tibetan refugees, wading through deep snow, were shot at by Chinese border guards. A 17-year-old nun was killed, a tragedy filmed by a Romanian photographer on a nearby climbing expedition, who later smuggled the video out of Tibet. The event has already been turned into a documentary, Murder in the Snow, and a non-fiction book, Murder in the High Himalayas. What Heighton brings to the story is a detailed and nuanced imagining of the ethical dilemmas faced by invented characters put in that situation. Lewis Book is an experienced activist doctor whose history with Doctors Without Borders has both influenced and alienated his teenager daughter Sophie. A fanatical young activist herself, who has recently landed in trouble with the law, she has seen too little of her explorer/doctor father over the years. To reconnect with Sophie, Book takes a job as a medic on an expedition to the summit of Kyatruk, and takes her along. Sophie soon develops a crush on Canadian documentary maker, Amaris McRae, who’s also along for the adventure. McRae was adopted from Vietnam by Canadian parents who were such hardcore activists that McRae had become determinedly apolitical over the years. This sort of explains her attraction to Wade Lawson, the expedition leader. An off-putting borderline narcissist, Lawson is on a journey of redemption after being falsely blamed by the mountain climbing community for the death of his brother. He and McRae are sexually involved, though the fiercely detached McRae is obviously the alpha partner. Book insists on going down to tend to the victims of the shooting, to the consternation of McRae—who would rather film it from more of a distance—and the anger of Lawson, who can feel his expedition/redemption begin to disintegrate. Nevertheless, McRae follows and the Chinese soon take her and Book into custody with the surviving refugees. Heighton writes forcefully and beautifully. He maps out the tensions inherent in the situation, and between the characters, with impressive precision. But there’s something about these characters that began to lose its grip on my interest too soon into the novel. In particular the women, Sophie and Amaris, and the good-natured, fatalistic Tibetan nun Choden, feel more constructed than organic. This would be less of a problem if they were minor characters, but they become major characters through the structure of the book, which is told from the point of view of four characters, Book, Lawson, Sophie and Amaris. The different perspective trick worked great in the classic mountain climbing documentary Touching the Void. I think it would have worked better if Heighton had told the story from the two most opposed characters, Lawson and Book. The effect of hearing the story from four characters, especially when two of them don’t quite feel real, is too diffuse. Still, this is a gorgeous book in so many ways—well-written, packed with interesting history and great views. More often than not, it’s a compelling, rewarding read and well worth the effort it occasionally takes to complete the journey. EVERY LOST COUNTRY BY STEPHEN |
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