Kim Echlin's New Novel of Tragic Love and Longing

Guek Eav, known by his alias Duch, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for crimes he allegedly committed as head of the notorious Tuol Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh during the ultra-Maoist regime's 1975-79 reign. His trial began on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, thirty years after the genocide of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

On the first day of his trial, Duch begged his victims, their families, and the country for forgiveness, declaring he was responsible for thousands of deaths for which he felt "heartfelt sorrow."

If forced to choose an alternate title for Toronto author Kim Echlin's new novel, The Disappeared, 'Heartfelt Sorrow' would certainly fit the bill.

The tragedy centres around Anne Greves, a Montreal teenager, and her Cambodian lover, Serey, a student and musician living in exile in Montreal in the 70s during the time of the Killing Fields in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.

Despite their disparate backgrounds, both characters share a history of loss. Raised by an emotionally distant father after her mother dies during her infancy, the teenager Anne is drawn to the solitary vulnerability of Serey, who has had no contact with his family since the Cambodian borders were closed just after he fled to Canada. She knows at the start of their affair that despite their love, he will leave her. The turmoil of Cambodia shadows their relationship.

When the Vietnamese invade Cambodia and the borders are re-opened, Serey returns home in a futile effort to find his family and for eleven years, Anne is left wondering about the fate of her lover. A case of mistaken identity she thinks she sees him in a crowd on a televised Cambodian memorial prompts her to leave her life in Montreal and travel to Phnom Penh to find him.

Anne's longing for Serey is palpable as is her desperation once she miraculously finds him and they resume their life together. The connection between the two lovers remains but the years of separation and trauma he has experienced have changed him these changes lead to a second disappearance during a political coup.

The Disappeared is heartbreaking, absorbing, and beautifully observed if at times frustrating. Perhaps because of her age when the two characters meet, Anne Greves seems to exist in arrested development she never sheds the adolescent melodramatics of the sixteen year-old who first encounters Serey in a Montreal blues club. The character of Anne doesn't seem to realize the brutal realities beyond the confines of Serey's yellow bedroom' - this highlights the couple's fundamental, cultural incompatibilities. I grew slightly impatient with this character, for even with the maturity that eleven years of separation would provide she risks the lives of her Cambodian friends who help her on her mission to find the lost Serey. Her determination to bring find her lover, at all costs, began to cause this reader to lose empathy for the character.

I was moved by The Disappeared, not so much by the love story around which the story is centered, but by Kim Echlin's poetic first-person narrative and the novel's political context of a nation traumatized yet determined to carry on after genocide. For me, this novel sparked an interest in the Cambodian struggle that carries on today.

As those responsible for the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge face trial now, 30 years after 1.7 million Cambodians were murdered, this work of fiction is a reminder of the atrocities suffered through this very real episode of political oppression and genocide.

By Andrea Corlett