Daily Times

“Vice never sees its own ugliness — if it did, it would be frightened by its own image. Shakespeare’s Iago, who behaves in a way that’s true to his nature, sounds false because he is forced by our dramatic conventions to unmask himself, to himself be the one to lay bare the secrets of his complex and crooked heart. In reality, man seldom tramples his conscience underfoot so casually” — George Sand.

A boy, who hero-worships his father, lives with this constant need to be appreciated by him. A son, who is a tormented mute witness to his father’s secret vice and his mother’s helplessness, gradually withdraws into a world where everything is the way it should be. A sorcerer who creates a world of illusion that provides him with a blissful temporary refuge from his own ugly, unpalatable reality. A young man in love who, caught up in his obsessive emotional whirlpool, gets dangerously close to blurring the line between the accepted and the not accepted. A soldier who goes into a war brimming with unrealistic notions of what lies ahead, and who returns to his country wiser, and unbeknownst to him, possessed by demons that haunt him mercilessly and forever. A politician who has a clear plan, making sure every step that is taken is gauged and measured. And a married man who loves his wife with all of him, only to realise in the end that he has left her with nothing. All these selves jumbled one on top of the other, jostling, shoving, somersaulting and gasping for breath, come together as one uniquely complicated, deeply enigmatic, irrevocably flawed individual — John Wade — the protagonist in Tim O’ Brien’s splendid work of fiction, In the Lake of the Woods.

Tim O’ Brien is considered one of the greatest writers of his generation, one of the best among his contemporaries. Most of his stories are fictionalised tales of his war experiences in Vietnam, with other themes, plots and sub-plots cleverly interwoven in his narrations. His book Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979, the title story from his acclaimed work The Things They Carried won a National Magazine Award and for In the Lake of the Woods, he was honoured with the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995.

Reading In the Lake of the Woods, you are struck by a myriad of emotions. As you try to grasp one, you are hit by another, then another and it goes on until the end of the book. This, to me, is O’Brien’s biggest achievement as a writer. Without using any grand literary flourishes and over-the-top writing embellishments, he manages to put together a story that is so simply executed that sometimes it manages to cleverly camouflage its textured complexity. His ordinary words talk about the colossal, his simple lines mark the ever-expanding, ever turbulent frontiers of human spirit and his terse phrases try, bravely, to highlight the chimerical, sometimes horrifying shape of the human heart. His writing is too real, too close to reality for it to ever become mundane, to ever evoke indifference. When one of his characters braves pain, you get this indistinct feeling of the writer penning down the anguish with unshed tears in his eyes. When one of them breaks down in a dark isolated room, you get this uneasy feeling that the writer stared out at a cold, still horizon in an inky, starless night, alone. When someone falls apart in his story, there is this eerie sense you get of the writer trying to put together splinters of his own badly injured soul somewhere. When a loved one is lost in his stories, if you close your eyes for a moment, you can almost visualise the writer kneeling next to a fresh grave, uttering muted prayers, stifling animal howls of pain. What O’Brien writes comes from some innermost recess of his soul, from some profoundly layered parts of his mind, from some irreparably damaged corners of his heart.

There is a line that a man dare not cross and deeds he dare not commit, regardless of orders and the hopelessness of the situation, for such deeds will destroy something in him that he values more than life itself. John Wade, during the Vietnam War — the bloodied and unforgettable backdrop to all of O’Brien’s stories — commits, witnesses and is sentenced to live with the rotting memory of such acts. In Thuan Yen, the massacre of unarmed civilians (children, women, old men) takes place, tainting the landscape and, subsequently, infecting the consciousness and the souls of indiscriminately shooting Americans for an eternity. The conscience isolates you; its voice is a warning that if you do this you will not be at peace ever again, is ignored. The violation of human connection and, consequently, the aftermath is incurable when the survivor has not merely been a mute spectator but also an active participant in the unspeakable atrocity. Wars destroy lives in more ways than one. The dead ones attain closure, the rest spend their lives exorcising the demons in vain. What they went through and what they made others go through is hell both ways. Nonetheless, wars were there yesterday, are waged today and, unfortunately, will be perpetrated tomorrow.

To be loved mattered more to John Wade than anything else. Being appreciated was something he worked hard for. Presenting the perfect façade to the world was of the utmost importance to him. He wanted to be happy, envisioning happiness as a secret country, an exotic foreign capital with bizarre customs and a new language. Politics to him was manipulation, like a magic show: invisible wires and secret trapdoors. Long ago, as a kid he had learned the secret of making his mind into a blackboard. Erase the bad stuff. Draw in pretty nice pictures. As an adult he deleted the bad, burying the unthinkable and pretending the past did not exist. Magic made him a sorcerer giving him the capacity to do what is manifestly impossible, a feeling of personal power masking his innermost inadequacies and insecurities. Ever the immaculate planner, he watched in disbelief as his house of sand and fog collapsed around him. The paradoxes of his inner and apparent world collided so violently that his entire being dissipated. The relationship that was his entire world dissolved into nothing in a small cabin by the lake in the woods and the world around him went on, indifferent, cruel, eternal.

The reviewer can be contacted at mehrt2000@gmail.com