Product Description

In search of love, absolution, or forgiveness, Charles Boatman leaves the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and returns mysteriously to Vietnam, the country where he fought twenty-nine years earlier as a young, reluctant soldier. But his new encounters seem irreconcilable with his memories.

When he disappears, his daughter Ada, and her brother, Jon, travel to Vietnam, to the streets of Danang and beyond, to search for him. Their quest takes them into the heart of a country that is at once incomprehensible, impassive, and beautiful. Chasing her father’s shadow for weeks, following slim leads, Ada feels increasingly hopeless. Yet while Jon slips into the urban nightlife to avoid what he most fears, Ada finds herself growing closer to her missing father — and strong enough to forgive him and bear the heartbreaking truth of his long-kept secret.

Bergen’s marvellously drawn characters include Lieutenant Dat, the police officer who tries to seduce Ada by withholding information; the boy Yen, an orphan, who follows Ada and claims to be her guide; Jack Gouds, an American expatriate and self-styled missionary; his strong-willed and unhappy wife, Elaine, whose desperate encounters with Charles in the days before his disappearance will always haunt her; and Hoang Vu, the artist and philosopher who will teach Ada about the complexity of love and betrayal. We also come to learn about the reclusive author Dang Tho, whose famous wartime novel pulls at Charles in ways he can’t explain.

Moving between father and daughter, the present and the past, The Time in Between is a luminous, unforgettable novel about one family, two cultures, and a profound emotional journey in search of elusive answers.

“Beautiful and timely…A sparse and moving meditation on the burden of war across generations.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Exquisite…With simple sentences, evocative images and subtle insights into elusive emotional states, the words don’t merely tell a story; they become poetry.”
–The Baltimore Sun

“This is a book of searching….Part war story…part expatriate novel, too, as if A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises had been rolled into one.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Brilliant…a literary triumph…As Kurt Vonnegut’s memorable “Slaughterhouse-Five” did so brilliantly with the impact of World War II, Bergen’s book lives and breathes the Vietnam experience.”
–Deseret Morning News (Best Books of 2005)

Best Books of 2005
–St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Intense…haunting…a profound meditation on human disconnection.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Spellbinding.”
–The Sunday Oklahoman

“Bergen is a master of understatement.…[his] elegantly crafted denouement is devastating and powerful, a testament to a writer who senses that some things–passion, violence–can be understood only by traveling outside one's comfort zone and traversing the far edges of reason.”
–San Diego Union-Tribune

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

“Affecting…delicate…At the end of this lovely novel, it is Ada and her siblings who are left searching, and the reader along with them.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“The Vietnam War has been the inspiration for scores of novels, but Bergen’s fifth book is one of the most moving we’ve encountered.”
–Sacramento Bee

“A beautifully crafted meditation on the frustrating search for emotional clarity….[This] simmering novel will mesmerize readers with the intensity of its vision.”
–Booklist

“Haunting and dreamlike…The author writes with a certain delicacy of description…[that] preserves the exquisiteness of the Vietnamese culture, lending a unique beauty to the story. Highly recommended.”
–Library Journal

“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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1451147 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-06
• Released on: 2005-12-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Ada Boatman and her father, Charles, cross borders in Canadian author Bergen's luminous fourth novel. As their surname suggests, the in-between approximates the watery space between life and death. The narrative alternates between Ada's and Charles's points of view, between their separate experiences in contemporary Vietnam and their past together in the Pacific Northwest. Charles, an isolated American Vietnam veteran turned Canadian woodsman, raises his three children—Ada, Jon and Del—in British Columbia after their mother's death. As they scatter into adulthood, Charles retreats further into the memories (especially the terror of a single day of combat) that keep him at arm's length from life. When a fellow veteran sends Charles a novel written by a Vietnamese soldier, the story moves Charles to revisit Vietnam. There, he attempts to peel back the dark shroud of memory, but he cannot make peace and disappears instead. Ada and Jon follow their father to Danang, where they confront his past, and where Ada, whose life has been defined by her father's long sadness, learns to forsake her unmoored existence in favor of inner reconciliation. 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. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Last month David Bergen won one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the Giller Prize (worth about $34,000), for this profoundly sad novel, The Time In Between. Written in a tightly controlled monotone that strives constantly for dramatic effect, it depicts the far-reaching emotional damage suffered by a Vietnam vet and his family. Bergen's ability to dramatize trauma-induced disaffection is undeniable; whether readers will want to sink down that hole with his characters is less clear.

Haunted for 30 years by the atrocities he witnessed and committed, Charles Boatman leaves his remote home in the Pacific Northwest and returns to Vietnam in hopes of gaining some understanding of what happened to him as a young soldier. He's motivated -- to the extent he manages to generate any motivation in the grip of his stultifying depression -- by a North Vietnamese novel about the war that bears a striking similarity to his own experience in combat. After a few weeks of drifting about Danang, talking with local writers and artists and particularly an American missionary and his wife, Charles disappears.

Two of his adult children, Ada and Jon, fly to Vietnam to search for him by retracing his steps, speaking with the people he met and even reading the Vietnamese novel that moved him. In fact, Bergen has created a 15-page "excerpt" of that book and dropped it into The Time In Between in a daring bit of ventriloquism that provides the novel's most affecting scenes. This would have been more impressive, though, if the "excerpt" didn't sound so similar to Bergen's distinctive style, and, in any case, it has the unfortunate effect of making the rest of his novel seem even more motionless by comparison.

Once Charles disappears, the story turns completely to Ada's deeply troubled soul as she drifts around this foreign land, alternately assisted and annoyed by a 14-year-old huckster. Frequently abandoned by her brother and unable to wrest any information from the local authorities about her father, she slides between nostalgia and loneliness. The Vietnamese people she meets are kind but alien, given to orphic pronouncements that will do nothing to disturb the stalest Western cliches about those inscrutable Orientals. Ada realizes eventually -- long after we do -- that she will have no more success than her father in finding what she needs here.

Bergen conveys all this in severely austere prose that some will find haunting and luminous, but to me seemed passive-aggressive -- a narrative voice that insists on our attention by speaking too softly and refusing to provide almost any discernible forward momentum. Kent Haruf's Colorado novels risk that charge, too, but his work offers a kind of spiritual depth that accrues through one deceptively plain sentence after another. By contrast, The Time In Between begins with a heavy sense of dislocation and despair and lets it curdle for 230 pages.

Then there's the problem of the butterfly. Consider this typical scene in which Ada and her Vietnamese lover share big thoughts between dramatic silences:

"Vu lit a cigarette. He did not speak.

"They drank warm beer and watched the sun set. It went down orange and then red. Beyond the palm trees in the courtyard, down the lane, Ada saw a woman riding a bicycle, her back straight, one arm steady at her side. Vu said that it was important to live without hate and bitterness and fear. 'This is possible,' he said. In the dusk, a butterfly passed."

A butterfly passed? Really? Then why doesn't it look like an insect instead of like a literary ornament of random detail? But that's Bergen's modus operandi: stark, dislocated observations to denote great suffering and disaffection. You think I'm swatting too hard at this little bug, but who's that straight-backed, steady-armed woman riding a bicycle? Forget it: She's just another butterfly pinned to the canvas of this self-consciously lethargic novel.

The Time In Between is just that: a series of momentous pauses between events in which desperately lonely people stare off at apparently random scenes and utter short, weighty observations. And once you notice Bergen's technique, instead of watching him soar, all you can see are the wires. Consider this Hemingwayesque moment in which Charles drops by the home of an American missionary and his wife:

"One Friday, late afternoon, he called on the family and she was alone; Jack had taken the children to the roller rink. She was on the balcony, sitting in her usual chair. Her bare legs, the half full glass of wine, the magazine in her lap -- he noted and found pleasure in these things. She'd cut her hair. He mentioned this.

" 'Do you like it? Sort of flapper.'

"It was. The bangs highlighted her green eyes. He nodded and sat. He said that he was lost."

There it is again: that deliberate fusion of the banal and the profound, and it keeps up, paragraph after paragraph, as characters pause, stare, sleep and utter muffled cries. The depressed will find no solace here, others only despair. In representing loneliness and disaffection, Bergen has succeeded all too well.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Time In Between, which won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, speaks to war’s lasting traumas. Emotionally damaged, Charles must make peace with his past—from his wartime brutality to his relationships with his ex-wife and adult children—to survive. This theme resonated with the critics, as did the variety of affecting scenes, from Charles’s violent flashbacks to Ada’s search for her father on the streets of Danang. Through its veil of despair, the novel moves hesitantly, in a monotonous voice that sometimes fails to heighten the action and deepen the characters. Despite its flaws, the novel proves that "there are still new things to say about Vietnam, and new ways to write about the way one conflict touched so many lives" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"His love for you is like weight that you have to carry"
Charles Boatman has spent most of his life haunted by the chaos of the Vietnam War. Enlisting at twenty, but having no real desire to fight, Charles, after almost three decades, is still struggling to win his own private war of salvation. Upon his return from the battle zone, he moves to the isolated mountains of British Columbia, Canada where he builds a home and raises his three children, his eldest daughter Ada, and the twins, Jon and Del, intent to eke out a life living of the land, whilst trying to suppress the demons of his past.

Plagued by nightmares and dreams, the ghosts of the murdered, Charles can never quite exorcise the bloody images of battle, particularly the senseless killing of a young Vietnamese boy on the Han River, whom he shot in a moment of fear. With the exodus of his children, leaving to making their own lives for themselves, Charles feels ancient and unmoored, so on the spur of the moment, he books a ticket to Vietnam, and then cancels it, unsure of what he will find if he goes.

When an old war colleague lends him a book written by a North Vietnamese soldier, Charles is immediately drawn to this young man's harrowing story of survival; the author's brooding photograph and the sadness that seems to hover around and above him intriguing Charles. The story provides Charles' final catalysis, opening up a kinship with something, awakening of the moral forces that have so overwhelmed him. Twenty-eight years after leaving Vietnam as a young soldier, Charles decides to make the return trip, returning to a country that has had such a profound effect on his life.

Charles rebooks a ticket to Hanoi, thinking that in some way he might conclude an event in his life that has consumed and shaped him. However, upon his arrival this aging war veteran abruptly vanishes. It is left to his children, Ada and Jon to pick up the pieces, to travel to Vietnam, to this "perplexing and alien place, where the language was more beautiful because they could not understand it," to find and perhaps recover their missing father.

Whilst Jon travels, seeking out the distraction of men, Ada is left in DaNang, trying to make sense of Charles' story. She meets an officious and unhelpful police inspector, who tells her that her father remains missing, and falls into the company of ex-pat American missionary Jack Doud, and his distracted, inattentive wife, Elaine, both had met Charles, even had dinner with him, and remembered that he had told them he felt "lost." Eventually Ada finds solace in the arms of a Hoang Vu, a disconsolate Vietnamese artist, who has survived the war and survived the hard times after the war, but continues to be plagued by his own ghosts.

A letter found in her father's bag gives Ada a sign that she so desperately needs; it's as though she is connected to her father as his voice lifts and falls away, the message tells of him looking out over the harbor of DaNang and contemplating, with great peace, his own death. Wracked by the guilt and pain, Charles wonders how he can take away the pain of the random shedding of innocent blood.

Charles imagined that by coming back to this place and solving some mystery that he would understand what had happened to him, but although the streets were the same, it was just not the same place, as everything else has vanished. Both father and daughter ache for a connection: Ada thinks about the future and the past and how she feels so detached, whilst Charles ponders the "light and shade" that falls across his own memories, a whole history arriving with absolute clarity and then disappearing.

Bergen writes beautifully of time and place, the story dreamlike, and poetic, espousing the universal themes of love, death, and mourning, as the author transports the reader to this striking and foreign landscape, where western values are seen as an anathema, and where exotic sights, sounds and smells dominate: a man leaning over a pool table, a child crying beside a chicken; a woman sleeping beside her jewelry shop, a boy being beaten by a stick, a man and a fridge on a bicycle.

Bergen offers no easy answers to the chaotic after-effects of war and the journey towards emotional healing, yet he shows how lives can often slip away, undiscovered. His characters "set sail in a particular direction, certain of the route," and then find themselves loose and set adrift. Charles remains paralyzed by his past actions, caught in an emotional dilemma not of his own making. Ada, wise and intelligent beyond her years, aches for her father, the man she has loved more than anyone. Both are wandering, helpless, through a quagmire of painful feelings, hoping against hope, fumbling toward a resolution that often seems impossible. Mike Leonard February 06.

An insightful journey to nowhere in particular
The thought-provoking title and liner notes filled me with anticipation as I starting into this book. The writer's style is straight-forward and vivid. He does an ample job of eliciting the characters' feelings and painting layered pictures of their surroundings. However, as the story progressed, I kept expecting to see some lines connect. Charles' eventual suicide, while somewhat expected, appeared almost arbitrary. His inner thoughts were never quite revealed, but maybe that was intended.

Bit characters like Yin (sic) appeared again and again but why? There was never any point to him. I kept expecting him to have some important piece in this puzzle of a tale.

Wan voh (sic) is portrayed as some sort of thoughtful Bhudda-like character, full of wisdom and few words. But he seems more of an aimless alcoholic. And what of the demons he was hiding? We never glimpse much. There was much more character development that could been done, more tied together with the other characters for more cohesiveness.

And the end!? Well it like being sucker punched, all the wind knocked out of you. I'm left asking what is the point of this book? If it is to protray several people's hopelessness and sadness, well I guess it did that. I guess I don't like sitting around hitting my thumb with a hammer either. I think Mr. Bergen could spend a few weeks out in the woods or at least ask his doctor for a different prescription. I'll never read another of this guy's books.

A great journey
Bergen has managed to take a story and tell it in a simple fashion with complicated characters that you want to keep learning more about.

The more you read the Time in Between, you realise it isn't about the location(s) it takes place in, or the background of the characters, but how you want to find yourself lost in this world where Charles, his children, and other side characters are meandering.

So much of what I have read of late is just hackneyed stock characters going through the motions. It was so pleasing to see real people for once in a novel, who are searching for something inside themselves, instead of just running from scene to scene to plod the story along.

There is nothing here that is also too heavy. From the notes here on Amazon you can already see it is about a former Vietnam Vet, but the book isn't about the war or Charles problems dealing with it. Part of the book takes place in Canada, but that location has nothing to do with the events that take place, the kids could have grown up anywhere. So don't be put off from the fact that Vietnam and Canada are mentioned, you don't have to be familiar with these places to understand the novel, let alone the Vietnam war.

The climax of the novel comes towards the middle if you haven't forseen it already, but Bergen makes you want to keep on reading. There is only the universal theme of moving on with life and the people who you meet along the way, perhaps it is truly "the time in between" that matters. Great read.