Asian beauty

>> Charles Foran's House on Fire is a surreal ode to Tibet

by JULIET WATERS

"I described this book to a good friend once," said Charles Foran discussing House on Fire over a bagel breakfast last week. "He said: 'Oh... So it's fuck globalization, but don't forget the love interest.' I guess I forgot the love interest."

Except there is a love interest in his latest novel, a spiritual thriller set in an imaginary country very much like Tibet. This is clear from House on Fire's erotic prologue. "It's a suspended love interest," Foran explains. But to elaborate on this, or on the rest of the plot, would ruin the novel.

Anyway, it would be the rare reader who would accuse Foran of pandering to popular taste. In the mid-'90s, when everything set in Ireland was violent, drunk, hilarious and obnoxious, Foran wrote The Last House of Ulster, a gentle but intense book about a deeply civilized family surviving "the Troubles." A few years ago, when everyone was doing memoirs about their dysfunctional families surviving the scary suburbs, Foran wrote The Story of My Life (So Far), his memoir of a happy, healthy childhood growing up in a Toronto suburb.

Though no great defender of Toronto, which he describes as a city where "no one has tea without a strategy" (he's generally considered an honorary Montrealer by those who knew him when he lived here), Foran declares himself officially bored with the "trashing suburbia" novel.

"There's no quicker initiation into the literary world than to write a book in which the suburbs are felt to be weird and perverse and full of people doing odd things... the terror of cutting your lawn. It's pretty lame, but it works like a charm. Look at American Beauty, which I thought was a really, really derivative and mediocre film. But it just sort of said that people in suburbs go into garages and lift weights and contemplate suicide. They don't. They just store their stuff in there."

To anyone desperate for perversity and a place full of people doing odd things, Foran would probably recommend China, where he did his trench work as a journalist, or maybe Tibet, which inspired the country of Gyatso in which House on Fire is set.

"This novel isn't about Tibet," he stresses. "But I wouldn't mind if readers take away a feeling of menace. And that there are maybe five million people in this high-altitude country who have lived for the last 50 years with this menace [the Chinese occupation] and with this brutality and destruction of their religion and with this confiscation of their culture."

On this subject, Foran has little patience for anyone who argues that contemporary Tibet is overexposed, or that the oppression of Tibetans is exaggerated by trendy Hollywood liberals. He has some harsh words for Globe & Mail correspondent Jan Wong, who made the argument last year that the number of inter-marriages between Tibetans and Chinese was evidence of a certain level of good will.

"There were six or seven foreigners in Tibet in 1950. And then the Chinese invaded it. Inter-marriage: good, excellent--it happens. That doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change the nature of what happened and it doesn't change the implications of what happened. We send in UN troops now to reverse invasions in other parts of the world, and we've hardly raised a peep about Tibet. Jan Wong got that so wrong, and the gleefulness with which she got it wrong is terribly misplaced. There's nothing gleeful about it. It's funny how you're trying to stick it to the Richard Geres of the world so you wind up supporting a vicious regime. Haven't you done a great job as a journalist."

House on Fire is less about the viciousness of the Chinese than the irresponsibility of North Americans who travel in Asia. It's not a "fuck globalization" book. It's a "fuck oppression" book. But, in the end, don't forget our own responsibility.

House on Fire by Charles Foran, HarperCollins, hc, 232pp, $25