Cities of Refuge, Tin House Books, February 2013.
Canadian Michael Helm is not yet included on American readers’ radar as a must-read author. Helm’s oeuvre will make a faster, much-deserved beeline to the top of reading piles in the United States via understanding his writing’s connection with Michael Ondaatje’s: someone we count as one of our standard-bearers, someone who has transcended any one nation’s claim and earned universal gravitas as a writer.
The two Michaels share more than first name and citizenship. Both are editors of Brick magazine, lauded by Chilean writer and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman with an endorsement that rings true for Cities of Refuge: “so many adventuresome and courageous incursions and crossings of another sort... This is a brick that needs to be heaved right through the windows of every reading mind on the continent.”
Cities of Refuge, Helm’s third novel, was published in Canada in 2010. On its 2013 Tin House Books cover, the other Michael, of The English Patient renown, defines it: “powerful,” “intricate,” “heartbreaking.” These terms fit his peer’s accomplishments but mirror Ondaatje’s hallmarks of emotional impact and structural prowess, what enables plots that would crumble in a lesser architect’s plans to stand firm. Ondaatje isn't the only one intuiting a glimmer of his sensibility in Helm’s parallel, yet unique, literary endeavor. Both authors’ fiction has been nominated for some of Canada and the Commonwealth’s highest literary prizes. Ondaatje received the Giller Prize in 2000; Helm was nominated in 1997 for his debut novel.
With none of this symbiosis known, and only a cursory knowledge of hot topics in the United States - immigration reform, major shifts in ethnic and racial demographics - and in Latin America, where three elderly state architects of coordinated efforts to murder enemies of seven regimes in the 1980s went on trial close to the book’s release, the basic facts of Cities of Refuge could easily suggest news drives the author’s plot and is what makes his book urgent. One could imagine the setting, Toronto, is a stand-in for any number of places where the book’s population of illegal immigrants, marginal in characterization but central in concept, might seek new lives. Both of these assumptions would underestimate Helm as an artist who consistently engages with similar themes of responsibility, searches shadowed by portending deaths and obsessions with unknown figures and whose language to describe them is a master class in lyricism of the real.
The book can be intimate with Toronto’s social and physical geography because the city was Helm’s home for almost twenty years. But Helm doesn't write about Toronto simply because he lived there. Like the other Michael, his material serves evolving questions. It situates what he knows in tension with history, specific enough to fit a character, universal enough to resonate for any reader. It is a dangerous exercise in non-fiction to assume one know’s another motives. Certainly there may be a timely reason asylum policy bubbles in his novel, or Helm could have a political stake, a policy agenda for addressing these issues. Late this spring, Toronto became a ‘sanctuary city’ for undocumented workers by announcing its services would not ask those seeking help about their legal status.
As readers, we are rewarded by the longer view of fiction: what the text can do for us today and ten years from now. This text is of multiple views. Helm, in the Toronto Star, describes it as about “different kinds of belief.” There is no omniscient narrator to guide us, only a swirl of characters deciphering situations, working from different facts and values, sometimes with incorrect assumptions these are shared. Clarity and doubt compete over memory’s accuracy and the righteousness of courses of action; identity construction dominates an epic of unknowing. Truth, transparency and trust - the search for and the lack thereof - are its underpinnings. “Certain events are not time-bound,” says its shifting narrative voice.
Timelessness can imprison us by preventing resolution.Helm moves between continents and decades, but his characters only do this in their memories; there, his most exciting work happens. The two characters on the opposite end of the belief spectrum ostensibly share a singular event as the axis around which their other thoughts move. The event is a physical attack on daughter Kim, who volunteers helping immigrants create false documents so they can build new lives, truths, on lies meant to keep them safe. This is our first encounter with appropriating others’ truths - stories copied from real testimonies - for ‘good’ purposes. But where it is transparent that secrets must be kept, trust is both necessary and lacking. The undocumented - “the world [which] gathers at our dumpsters” - are poor, fleeing lives in Africa and Latin America, specifically zones seething with violence where clients could be both victim and perpetrator. Two hundred languages are spoken in Toronto, a hub for those who are “in the world but not on the record. globally...the largest category [of people].”
Helm’s preoccupation is with the wounds between those who love each other and are strangers to each other, between Kim and her father Harold, who is obsessed with finding his daughter’s attacker. The father-daughter duo’s conflicting efforts to recover after her assault lead to a deadly “physics of shame and regret.” Harold believes her involvement with ‘illegals’ must be why she was attacked. Kim, “batterer of authorities,” bridges official histories containing fact or truth but rarely both, and fictional histories, which become closest to truth.
In a pivotal scene, Kim remembers spying on Harold crying on a balcony when the sun rose. Remembering, watching others in secret, emotions the watcher could not understand because of withheld or merely unknown information: Helms gives us all of this in a childhood memory. In this instant, we know Harold has repressed pain, but not the weight or source of it. Helm presents repression of many varieties: of desire, of knowledge, of responsibility ,of human rights. As “coups and revolutions don’t happen to nations, they happen to people. one by one,” repression doesn't happen only by policy forced upon societies. It happens to individuals through involuntary habits of the mind. The phrase “neurophysiology of trauma” appears when Kim seeks to understand that her attacker “had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.”
Including evolving science is a valuable twist in the novel that seeps into how we consider real asylum seekers, such as young children, who witness violence. Is what they do later fate or science, without intervention? Some current neuroscience in this country seeks to connect criminal responsibility to brain chemistry, and the ramifications are tremendous. Kim senses “ [the attack] had been not a singular event but a kind of sounding within a slow pattern much older than she was.” The man Harold becomes obsessed with as Kim’s likely attacker defends an abused woman, but his familiarity with women’s scared faces speaks of acts he has committed that he cannot erase from memory.
Our long sojourns with Harold and Kim’s thoughts give us explicit knowledge of their feelings about guilt and responsibility, feelings that arise later when the reader contemplates characters whose physical guilt in crimes might be definite, but whose moral guilt is murkier. Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneering cognitive neuroscience, argues against the grain of many peers that physical discoveries do not erode the existence of free will in 2011’s Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. His earlier works gave neuroscientists the green-light to openly discuss an issue they had previously tiptoed around: the relationship between physical processes in the brain and what legal systems have, for centuries, evaluated as moral in a separate vacuum disconnected from the body. Concepts of intent have come from a person’s statements and actions. Now that we understand the relationship between these and the chemistry behind those statements and actions, does the equation change?
Language, like chemistry, is not neutral; its betrayals render a commentary on asylum policies, labels bestowed on individuals, and our own tampering with memories, using one situation to stand in for another. Sometimes we read Harold thinking about Chile, and nod our heads thinking, yes, about the Toronto attack. The power to transcend silences with renderings of other sensations - honest indications of sentiment, of connection, of what one values and what places one interacts with - is visceral. A voice is “a physical thing borne upon the metaphysical, the resonant workings of breath and belief.” Readers visualize, hear and even smell characters.
The wounds that Helm is exploring are not surface wounds to one’s leg; they are wounds to one’s emotional capacities, to what some would term one’s legal culpability; to one’s wholeness. Harold demands to know if the book’s ‘true believer’ thinks “he and I and all your undocumented semi literate bloodstained young monsters” are the same. His desperate question is, are we all the same? How? Why? The novelist remains essential in the age of fMRI, insightful to policymakers, profound as the philosopher.
-CMMOB, June 2013
THE BOOK
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