On Steven Heighton’s “Bystanders”

On Steven Heighton’s “Bystanders”

Or, how The Walrus excerpts fiction

By Jared Bland • March 31, 2010 • 1 Comment

Illustration by Benbo George Steven Heighton’s new novel, Every Lost Country, will be referred to as his Tibetan book, for understandable reasons: it opens with a 2006 incident on the China-Tibet border, and the ensuing action traces the reverberations of that event across both countries. But like all of Steven’s work, it will be remembered in a much more complex way than such simple epithets allow, cherished for its characters, who are numerous, challenging, and deeply alive; for its precise and beautiful language; and for its ambitious (and successful) effort to grapple with issues that are central to the way we live in a world of ever-increasing moral ambiguity.

Steven and I started talking about the possibility of running a section of it in The Walrus last summer, when we were working on his story “Noughts & Crosses: An Unsent Reply,” which ran in our November 2009 issue. Editing fiction for the magazine means reading an incredible number of stories each month, so I leapt at the change of pace of Steven’s manuscript. I read Every Lost Country while travelling in Turkey, and, as I told Steven on my return, the highest compliment I can give the book is that it gripped me so much that I stayed put for an entire day to finish it.

I knew we had to excerpt this truly exceptional novel, but wasn’t sure of the best way to do so. Every Lost Country follows several different main characters, and is told in a sort of third-person limited omniscience that alternates among them. So to isolate one section of the book is necessarily to cut off many voices; viewing something through the eyes of just one of them fails to represent the nuance with which the novel constructs events. The opening scene, for instance, is viewed repeatedly from different perspectives. It’s only after seeing it these many times that the reader begins to understand the complexity of what’s happening, an interconnectedness that subtly suggests the way in which we all become, to some degree, dependent on those around us as co-builders of our lives.

I originally wanted to use a section of the novel in which Lew Book, the Toronto doctor whose minor heroics are seen at the end of “Bystanders,” plays a Nepalese strategy game called bagh chal with Kaljang, a sherpa. For me, it contained so many layers, and stood alone as a wonderful set piece. But it occurs too far into the novel to make sense on its own. In the end, we settled on a slightly adapted version of the novel’s opening, in which we see the border event for the first time through the eyes of Sophie, Lew’s daughter. I love the clarity of her perspective, the way in which she dissects this deeply confusing event, parsing its component parts and attempting to make sense of it. I felt that it resonated with the experience of the reader (and thus is a clever way to open a book). And I loved the section that followed, in which we return to the past and to Toronto as we recall through Sophie her father’s intervention with the high school kids. For me, Lew’s assertion that “there’s no such thing” as bystanders speaks not only to the preceding section, but addresses the major dilemma of the novel that’s to come.

Every Lost Country will be released in early May from Knopf Canada. Hopefully you’ll pick up in the book where we left off in the magazine. Watch this space — we’ll be giving away a few signed copies in this space to help with the transition.

(Illustration by Benbo George)