by JULIET WATERS

An elegant man in his 60s, Gil Courtemanche is sitting in his publicist's airy Westmount living room, at 9:30 a.m, smoking a Gauloise. He is not a morning person. It will take another two cigarettes before I start to recognize the passionate but gentle voice of A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. I'm not in the greatest shape myself, having found it hard to sleep after finishing his first novel, set in Rwanda at the time of the genocide.

A week ago I heard Courtemanche on the CBC answering a question about why his novel was so relentlessly graphic. "I tried to write a sweet book about a genocide," he answered without sarcasm. "But it wasn't possible."

A bitter book would have been easier. There's a lot to be bitter about. The indifference of the West, the incompetence of the UN. The impotence of the Canadian general sent to keep peace. The fascism of the Belgians who imported the idea that the Tutsis, being paler, were genetically purer than the Hutus. And the malevolent revenge of the Hutus who massacred several of Courtemanche's friends.

But the voice of journalist Bernard Valcourt, Courtemanche's alter ego, is not especially bitter. He has no illusions of being drawn to Rwanda on a moral mission. He's simply part of the gang of "international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, screwed-up or melancholy expatriates of various origins, and prostitutes" who hang out at the pool of the Hôtel des Mille-Collines. Out of loneliness and grief from the recent death of his wife, Valcourt falls hopelessly in love with Gentille, a young Hutu waitress who has the tragic misfortune of looking like a Tutsi. Unable to leave her, he becomes witness to one of the worst nightmares in human history, a nightmare he describes with a detached empathy that owes much to his hero Albert Camus.

Courtemanche was actually in France at the time of the genocide, though he had spent time in Africa before. With an eye for the unexpected story, he had produced a documentary, The Gospel of AIDS, about a group of Catholic priests and nuns who had taken it upon themselves to distribute condoms and encourage safe sex. Courtemanche made fateful friendships in both the Hutu and Tutsi community. "They killed the moderate Hutus first," he explains to me, "since this was also a coup d'état within a genocide."

He returned to find out what happened to his friends, and to find their killers. This wasn't hard; most of the bodies were buried in communal graves. "It was as if in Westmount," he explains, gracefully gesturing outside the window, "you had two or three mass graves, where people could look for a yellow shirt or a red scarf." The killers were by-and-large unrepentant. "I went to visit them in jail. They were young and a bit stupid. And they had the same reasoning: 'If I didn't kill, I would get killed.'"

Courtemanche worked on a documentary, which he describes as "30 little stories about survivors." But he found the project both hard to do and hard to sell.

So he sat down to write a book with no intention of writing a novel. He offers no writerly babble about characters taking over, or stories having a life of their own. "I was drunk a lot of the time when I wrote it," he says. "So I don't really remember how it became a novel." He was, however, quite sober when he rewrote it. This is one explanation for the unbearable lucidity with which Valcourt sees the world. Another is his decision to trade happiness for awareness.

It's a lucidity Courtemanche seems to share, after a few cigarettes anyways. I ask him if anything can be learned from Rwanda. When he answers he sounds like he is talking about a beautiful young waitress, not a disappointing civilization. "That is the fantastic thing about humanity," he says. "It never learns."

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche,
Knopf, hc, 256pp, $34.95