The Time in Between

by David Bergen Narrated by Anna Fields

Overview

Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam after the war.

Ada and her brother Jon follow their missing father to Vietnam. Their search for him tears them apart in ways they never could have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between Charles' and Ada's points of view, their journeys become increasingly colorful and complex as the story moves from the rural Pacific Northwest to the frenetic confusion of modern-day Vietnam. The suspense builds, dreamlike, to a paradoxical climax of revelation and obfuscation, love and grief.

This is a hauntingly beautiful story of family ties and human longing by the prize-winning, critically acclaimed Canadian author David Bergen.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A Canadian soldier's return to Vietnam 30 years after the war sends powerful ripple effects throughout several lives, in Winnipeg author Bergen's moving fifth novel. A brief prologue locates Charles Boatman's adult daughter Ada and her younger brother Jon in Danang, seeking Charles, who has disappeared. Bergen then juxtaposes multiple stories. We learn of Charles's youth in Washington state, years of marriage and fatherhood in British Columbia and separate traumatic experiences in combat halfway around the world, and back home, where he's confronted by his wife Sara's infidelity, and her early death. Then, as he seeks the past in postwar Vietnam ("thinking . . . he might conclude an event in his life that had consumed and shaped him"), Charles finds only piercing echoes of the violence he had both suffered and perpetrated, with sadly foreseeable results. A parallel narrative follows Ada's travels and discoveries (with and without Jon) as she follows her father's gradually fading trail, dodges the attentions of a 14-year-old hustler-entrepeneur (Yen) who appoints himself her guide and guardian, and falls into a subdued sexual relationship with a middle-aged artist (Hoang Vu) who seems as perplexed by her obsession with him as does Ada herself ("Perhaps he was the country, or her father, or simply a notion of the country, or a notion of her father"). Bergen presents "the sorrow of war" as an exfoliating fog that grips and obscures all the war's victims-on the battlefield, in shared memories and in dreams filled with disturbing indigenous images. And, in excerpts from a combat novel written by a former North Vietnamese soldier-in which Charles (who reads it) finds his own sins and sorrowsmirrored-the unity of human suffering is made stunningly, heartbreakingly clear. A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.

From the Publisher

Luminous. . . . In this meditation on the aftereffects of violence and failed human connection, Bergen’s austere prose illustrates the arbitrary nature of life’s defining moments.”
-Publishers Weekly

“A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Bergen] preserves the exquisiteness of the Vietnamese culture, lending a unique beauty to the story. Highly recommended.”
-Library Journal

“Bergen’s best writing evokes the absence of what has been lost and, even more terribly, what is not there to be found.”
-Globe and Mail

“With his thoughtful dialogue, Bergen makes the characters’ heartache seep off the page.”
-Time

“David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that’s both erotic and hypnotic. Set mostly in modern-day Viet Nam, The Time In-Between is a deeply moving meditation on love and loss, truth and its elusiveness, and a compelling portrait of a haunted man, Charles Boatman, and his daughter who seeks to solve the mystery of his disappearance.”
–Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness

“David Bergen’s The Time In-Between is about how children inherit their parents’ ghosts and the elusive nature of grace. It also makes a stunning connection between the wars that are fought out in the world, and the ones that cleave families in private. Ravishingly told and deeply felt, it’s a huge accomplishment.”
–Michael Redhill, author of Martin Sloane

“The Time In-Between is a spare, suspenseful meditation on the long reach of war – to the places where it is fought, the people who fight it, and the people who love those people. In portraying the lingering devastation left in one soldier’s life by a war he fought a generation ago, Bergen’s novel could not be timelier or more chilling.”
–Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me

“In this elegant novel, David Bergen weaves a precise and resonant prose through the connected histories of people touched by love, death and war. A lovely, sad, and ultimately redeeming work of fiction.”
–Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

“Intelligent, humane, deep in its sympathetic understanding, David Bergen’s novel explores the haunted life of the Boatman family in the late aftermath of the Vietnam War. There is in this novel not a single sentimental or euphemistic line; and because the writing is honest, the characters are real, and their struggle as a family has the ring of truth.”
–Donald Pfarrer, The Fearless Man: a Novel of Vietnam

DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile

Ada and Jon comb Vietnam for their missing father, Charles, a troubled veteran who has returned to the scene of a wartime atrocity. Ada hunts doggedly as Jon pursues homosexual liaisons. The story of their quest is periodically interrupted by flashbacks of the father’s angst-ridden odyssey. Minor narrative holes may have resulted from abridging the book to four listening hours. As read for the CBC by Michael Hogan (the father's sections) and Tricia Collins (Ada's chapters), melancholy and gloom overwhelm the story. While the former performs serviceably, the latter is a particularly bland reader, whose air of listless hopelessness is relieved only by moments of mild shock. The text has more colors and energy than she invests in it. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169573145
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The typhoon arrived that night. Ada woke to the sound of rain driving against the windows. Above them, on the rooftop, chairs fell and banged against the washstand. The corrugated tin on the stairwell roof worked loose and flapped for an hour before it broke free and fell like a whirling blade down onto the street. Ada was standing at the window watching the palm trees bend in the wind and she saw the tin roofing fly by and land on the tennis courts in the distance. The power went out and then flickered on and finally cut out completely. Ada woke Jon, her brother, who had returned while she was sleeping, and she held his hand and said, “I’m frightened.”

He sat up and said, “It’s a small storm. ­ Don’t worry.”

She could smell sex on him; sometimes the smell was musty and bleachy but tonight it was sweat and the slightest hint of old saliva. That smell. She stood and walked across the room. “The boats are coming in,” she said. “They know something we ­don’t. I’ve counted thirty already.”

The wind pulled at the hotel sign and threw it onto the street below.

“Get away from the window,” Jon said. “The glass could fall in.”

She sat at the edge of his bed and he held her hand and they listened. The wind arrived from out of the sky and from across the ocean and it seemed that it would never end, until it slid away, a deceptive and distant howl, and then returned just as quickly, banging against the trees and buildings, and everything loose was pulled into the maelstrom. She wanted it to stop. She began to shiver and even though Jon was beside her she felt very much alone.

“Look at us. We’re so stupid,” she said.

“Here,” Jon said, and he made her lie down and he covered her. He held his hands over her ears and put his thumbs against her eyes until the hollow core of the typhoon descended. And with that awful stillness came the everyday sounds: the clock on the bureau; something, perhaps a rat, moving about on the rooftop; the dry cough of the old man below them; the song of a woman calling again and again.

“It’s gone,” Ada said.

Jon said it would return. She said that the waiting frightened her more than the wind. She said she believed that their father was dead.

Jon was quiet. A siren sounded. The lights flashed across the dark sky and then disappeared.

Videos