A beautifully written book about the grossest of subjects; the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. The language and images float like spider silk, even as they describe the atrocities committed against a people. Orwell's "1984" is a book about totalitarianism, but it left me the reader on the outside looking in; Thien's book is a novel, but it reeks utterly of real people whose lives get snuffed out.
The book traces the splintering of family relationships under the ideology of the "Year Zero" return to a clean sheet for society. it also traces the splintering of the individual, as psyches are assaulted first by being cut adrift from others, then having to survive bodily the harshest of privations and then identities are deliberately stripped away as people are renamed and forcibly made to ascribe to the ridiculous sayings of "Angkar", the Khmer Rouge's authoritarian "Organisation". The sayings are part Marxism, part Buddhism and part nonsense. They are empty boasts from the very get go of the revolution. " I looked at the sky, at the trees, at the disturbed mound of earth and saw no possible gods". An agricultural people stripped from their spiritual atachment to the land through turning them into killing fields of dead bodies.
The reason I give this book 4 stars rather than 5 is because it sets up a potentially fascinating image, since the two main protagonists who have remade new lives in Montreal are both scientific researchers of the human brain. They engage with it at an electro-chemical level, stimulating the neurons, breaking down everything into the constituent chemical reactions. implicit in this is that human emotions too are just chemical reactions, including the suffering and emotional turmoil that plays merry hell with memory- what we retain, what we lose. But this theme is never really returned to, and the future lives of the two characters at the start of the book, remains an untapped resource for its bulk.
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