Write of Passage

Author Madeleine Thien. Photo Steve Carty.

In her debut novel, Certainty, Madeleine Thien kills herself  — not ha-ha slays herself, but kills off a character who shares almost everything with the author but her name. Gail Lim, the novelist’s alter ego, is an Asian-Canadian radio writer whose grandfather was killed under suspicious circumstances by the Japanese in Indonesia during the Second World War. Gail dies on the first page of Certainty, and the book proceeds back in time, recounting Gail’s mission to uncover her family’s long-hidden secret.

Death is not the usual obsession of a first-time novelist, but Thien isn’t that writer — the trendily tortured scribe eagerly seeking a rendezvous with the Reaper, one Marlboro at a time. In an interview in a book-lined den at Toronto’s Spoke Club, the 31-year-old writer presents herself as a thoughtful, generally optimistic sort; you can tell the Quebec City resident is the type of person who’d always pick the right birthday card and endorse it with neither too much nor too little sentiment.

Rather than having a prematurely macabre sensibility, Thien’s interest in death arose after her mother died, an event that occurred early in the process of writing Certainty.

“I was dealing with grief, while writing about it,” says Thien, previously the author of the critically acclaimed 2001 short-story collection Simple Recipes. Her mother’s demise focused Thien’s mind on what passing away entails. “The only books I could read after she died were science books, a lot about the study of consciousness. I wanted to know, as a child does, where my mother went, what happened to that person.”

The resulting book is a hybrid: an accessible novel of ideas (where, if anywhere, do we go after this?); a mystery (why did the Japanese kill the grandfather?); a multi-generational family saga and, best of all, a gorgeously written travelogue that takes readers to Vancouver, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong and the Netherlands.

The third of three children, Thien grew up in various homes, mainly around Vancouver. “We moved a lot, and I was shy, so books became my refuge,” says Thien, whose father was a realtor and mother a purchasing executive. A long-time student of dance, Thien was midway through a pre-professional studio program at Simon Fraser University when she switched to the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program. “I was in dance just because I’d been doing it my whole life, not because I was passionate about it.”

Courtesy McClelland & Stewart.

Certainty evolved from Thien’s desire to investigate her grandfather’s mysterious murder, an investigation that took her on a two-month backpacking circuit of her family’s native Indonesia, a place she had never previously visited. “I was shocked that the street food was like what my Dad made at home — the stuff I’d always imagined was our family’s private food.”

During her research, distant relatives and family friends came out of the woodwork. “There were no old buildings in my father’s hometown, Sandakan,” Thien recalls. “But more than 20 people gathered to talk to me about it. They were curious because they hadn’t met many writers.”

Much has been made of the fate of the European expats imprisoned by the Japanese throughout East Asia during the Second World War, but less about how fellow Asians attempted to survive the depredations of the Far East’s then-dominant regional power. Despite their initial burst of enthusiasm at meeting a writer, few of the old-timers wanted to look backwards. “The people I interviewed there would describe their wartime experiences in a single brushstroke. They were determined to leave the past behind.”

On its face, the novel fits the usual postmodern paradigm. The story is told from multiple points of view, with different narrators recounting the same events from divergent angles. So far, so yawn. But this is the form, not the substance, of Thien’s fiction, and her book turns its back on the tired truisms of the postmodern era. 

“I didn’t want to write a book that said everything is uncertain and that you can’t know anything really,” Thien says, her speaking volume moving from barely audible to low as she warms to her theme. “No. I don’t believe that they — my characters, could find any peace if they believed there was nothing they could hold on to.” 

Hence the novel’s title, which comes from a quote from writer-cum-politician Michael Ignatieff’s book The Needs of Strangers: “We could face the worst if we simply renounced our yearning for certainty. But who among us is capable of that renunciation?” But if we won’t renounce our desire for answers, for meaning, what then? What can we know for sure? Thien’s fiction posits subtle responses to these age-old queries. But it’s clear she views objections to such questions as a cop-out.

Nor does the novel play the identity-politics cards so beloved of the last generation of Canlit. Although Certainty features characters who are colonizers and colonized, who are white and “of colour,” who hail from the Occident and the Orient, these differences aren’t central to the unfolding plot. “What binds my characters together, regardless of their background, is that they have so many similar questions,” Thien says.

One critic has compared Certainty to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. There is a dreaminess to both, a focus on the underlying thoughts of the novelist rather than what happens outwardly with the characters.

But Ondaatje’s book fits with a postmodern program: the man at the core of the book is a cipher, illustrating the postmodern conceit that we have no identifiable selves, that we’re ever-changing combinations of almost random traits. Thien, whose book has been sold into more than a dozen foreign markets, doesn’t follow in Ondaatje’s footsteps. “[Humans] can understand each other,” she says emphatically. “Perhaps not everything, but the real stuff.”

While her fictional stand-in manages to solve the central mystery of her grandfather’s murder, Thien herself was unable to figure out why her own forebear was shot in similar circumstances. Maybe we need our fiction to be tidier than our lives, to present the solutions that too often elude us in actuality. Who among us is truly capable of renouncing certainty?

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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