The Disappeared
by Kim Echlin
Hamish Hamilton (2009), 224 pp.

When Kim Echlin is good, she is very, very good, but when she is bad, she is florid. Her sometimes leaden prose — the reliance on rhetorical questions, the weakness for such purple phrases as “I received your touch, you received my relief as if we were giving agonized birth to each other” — threatens to sink this novel, yet it’s worth persevering; what remains is a poignant love story and a memorable journey through a nation’s troubled past.

The Disappeared unfolds mainly in small, confined spaces: bars and bedrooms and the backs of rickshaws. In its opening pages, Anne Greves, a teenage Montrealer, and Serey, a Cambodian math tutor five years her senior, meet at a smoky Buddy Guy concert on Halloween. He likes her hair, she likes that he fronts a rock band, and they quickly begin a fervent, consuming romance. In his kitchen on a Sunday, he shows her a yellowed telegram from his father in Phnom Penh dated four years earlier, the day before Pol Pot seized the capital. There has been no communication since, and when, weeks later, he learns that Cambodia’s borders have reopened, Serey promptly boards a plane and vanishes home.

Eleven years pass without a word. Then, watching news footage of the Vietnamese withdrawal, Anne believes she spots Serey’s face in a Cambodian crowd and she does not hesitate; she packs her belongings, quits her job, buys a visa, and touches down in the middle of the Phnom Penh market, hoping to see that face again. Of course, the man she finds is a ghost of the one she knew, and while their affair recaptures its former intensity a chasm of secrets and silence opens between them, with Anne desperate to ensure he doesn’t disappear once more.

Of all the tensions Echlin successfully negotiates in her novel — loss and recovery, betrayal and forgiveness, Eastern atrocity and Western indifference — the intersection of memory and language is the most nuanced. Although three decades have since intervened, Anne remains haunted by her past, driven to recount what occurred in a country still raw from a revolution that deemed the past irrelevant and reset the clock to year zero. As a student of Latin and a collector of Khmer folk wisdom, Anne is steeped in the phrases of the past. “For thirty years,” she says, “I have clung to words that might lend me a measure of comfort.” Pol Pot’s soldiers, by contrast, took a gun to anyone with ties to tradition — teachers, artists, monks — and filled the void with violent slogans about the urgency of the present: “Live or die for the greatness of the revolution. Expel all enemies.” Most heartbreaking are the survivors caught in the middle, those who were silenced and have “discovered again the passion of speech,” who describe for a stranger their incomprehensible tragedy and insist at the end, “I only want you to know.”

Echlin is most effective as a steward of those stories — there, she trades her more embellished musings for prose that is direct and devastating. She finds small acts of grace and dignity amid the suffering, and in this novel, it is these quiet gestures that speak the loudest.

More book reviews: Trevor Herriot’s Grass, Sky, Song