Brain Candy

Just in case you thought we were over-stating the case just a tad last week in our review of neurologist Liam Durcan’s (right) rather fine debut novel GARCIA’S HEART, we herewith present a selection of big-ups and hup-yas from Durcan’s Canadian hinterland, to wit:

“Engrossing. . . . Durcan doesn’t offer any easy answers in this searching, meticulously observed novel of moral complexity. He does offer plenty to think about.” — Toronto Star

“Lucid and subtle. . . . Durcan has crafted an entertaining and convincing portrayal of a man awkwardly perched atop a precipice of identities and histories on the verge of collapse.” — Montreal Review of Books

“Stunningly well-written. . . . Durcan writes the way one imagines a brain surgeon employs his tools — with strength to cut through bone and feather-light delicacy to excise minute strands of tissue. Durcan’s style is a mixture of precision and playfulness, irony and moral seriousness reminiscent of British master Ian McEwan, or even a slightly restrained Martin Amis … A remarkable accomplishment.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“With this remarkable debut novel, Liam Durcan … has firmly ensconced himself within the hallowed ranks of doctors making successful forays into literature, a line running straight from Chekov through William Carlos Williams and W. Somerset Maugham to, most recently, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam. . . .There are evocations of Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY here . . . Durcan beats McEwan at his own game by resisting the tendency to show off and, in doing so, produces a restrained, artfully paced work built around its central ethical question, which is not so much “what is evil?” as “what, exactly, is the nature of good?” — Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Like a cross between John le Carré and Ian McEwan – GARCIA’S HEART, treads the line between an elegant, elegiac novel of ideas and a sophisticated political thriller. It was exciting, intellectually compelling, and beautifully written. It was also that rarest of books: A literary work with an intensely humanistic core. I am so happy to have discovered Liam Durcan; he will be a major writer for years to come.” — Pauls Toutonghi

“Eloquent and haunting, GARCIA’S HEART fearlessly explores the moral ambiguities of the modern world. Durcan demonstrates his supreme versatility with this psychologically penetrating, technically assured, yet empathic and human portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a terrible angel.” — Eden Robinson,

“In his debut novel, Liam Durcan skilfully performs complex forensic procedures: autopsies on mysteriously damaged hearts, brain scans on characters whose deepest thoughts remain beyond diagnosis. Throughout, Durcan writes with operating room precision. A grim, gripping, confident, and provocative book.” — Steven Heighton

“Liam Durcan raises complex and important issues in GARCIA’S HEART, exposing the frailty of human nature against the background of medical science. It’s an intelligent book, thought-provoking and satisfying — a meditation on the workings of the mind. I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.” — Clare Morrall

So, there you have it. Liam Durcan. GARCIA’S HEART. Make yourself happy, people …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: GARCÍA’S HEART by Liam Durcan

As with Peter Carey’s THEFT, it’s difficult to know if GARCÍA’S HEART should be designated a crime fiction novel. The protagonist, the Canadian neurologist Patrick Lazerenko, travels to The Hague to attend a war crime tribunal in which his former mentor and friend, Hernan García, stands charged with aiding and abetting in the torture of prisoners in Honduras. Hernan took the delinquent Patrick under his wing when the pair met in Montreal, where Hernan, a former cardiac specialist, was running a grocery shop. Channelling the young man’s energy into a more productive course, Hernan is almost exclusively responsible for Patrick’s successful life as a scientist and a businessman. Assailed on all sides by vested interests – both defence and prosecution want him to testify; a journalist who has written a best-selling exposé of Hernan believes Patrick is hiding the truth of what he knew about Hernan’s life in Honduras; Celia, Hernan’s daughter and Patrick’s former lover, has accepted the help of a dubious advocacy group campaigning on Hernan’s behalf, and wants Patrick to row in with their efforts – Patrick investigates not only the facts of the case in order to satisfy himself of Hernan’s innocence, but also the mysteries of how the human mind functions.
  Despite the plethora of crime fiction tropes, however, GARCÍA’S HEART owes more of a debt to Graham Greene than Raymond Chandler. Beautifully written though it is, its elegiac tone lacks the rapid pace that would qualify it as a conventional thriller. Neither, despite Patrick’s role as the seeker after truth, is it a variation on the private investigator novel, as Patrick is a largely passive character, a receptacle of information rather that its conduit.
  Nonetheless, GARCÍA’S HEART is a real page-turner. Durcan has a deliciously light style that wears its learning lightly, offering pithy insights into the human condition that are laced with bone-dry flashes of humour (“It turns out Roberto and Elyse were pretty intimate,” Nina said with the seriousness that weapons-grade gossip demanded.). He also asks some profound questions of the human condition, as in this exchange between Hernan’s lawyer and Patrick:

“I mean, I can see it, you know. The brain determines our mental states, how we feel, and brain function is subject to physical laws; it’s determined.”
“Sure.”
“So, where is his free will? How can he be guilty? How can anybody be guilty?”

  In the end, the answers Patrick uncovers to these and other questions are messy, unsatisfactory and inconclusive. Durcan, himself a neurologist, refuses to deal in simplistic notions of good and evil and cause-and-effect, and nor is he overly concerned with the illusion of closure that characterises the crime / mystery genre. Instead he offers a downbeat but perfectly logical denouement that may well leave crime and mystery readers dissatisfied in the short term, but which offers hope to those who believe that a novel concerned with the traditional tropes of crime and criminality can be greater than the sum of its parts. – Declan Burke

Bring Us The Heart of Hernan García

Yet another Canadian-Irish writer hoves into view above a Greenland-shaped horizon, although as usual we’re a tad tardy off the mark with Paul Durcan’s GARCIA’S HEART, which arrived on the shelves back in November. Still, better late than later, as we always say. Quoth Publishers Weekly:

Neurologist Durcan dissects the ethics involved when politics, medicine and violence collide in this finely wrought novel about a neurologist turned biotech entrepreneur who travels to The Hague to witness his mentor’s war crimes trial. Patrick Lazerenko is a punk teen in Montreal when he first meets Hernan García, the Spanish immigrant owner of a neighbourhood grocery store. Caught trying to vandalize Hernan’s store, Patrick is roped into working off the damages and soon finds himself attached to the García family. When Patrick sees Hernan’s backroom medical consultations with local immigrants, he is inspired to become a doctor himself. Years later, a journalist exposes Hernan—dubbed the Angel of Lepaterique—as having been mixed up in the CIA-backed torture of subversive citizens in Honduras in the 1980s. Parallels to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are acute (and even overtly identified) as Hernan is accused of witnessing and aiding in detainee torture. Subplots involving a devious political think-tank, the long-expired romance between Patrick and Hernan’s daughter and the goings-on at Patrick’s company, provide a rich backdrop to the trial, but the centrepiece is the mélange of complex feelings that arise within Patrick, who finds himself simultaneously condemning and rooting for Hernan. – Publishers Weekly

For much, much more of the same, jump on over to Liam Durcan’s interweb yokeybus. Just don’t mention Mursheen and / or pickin’ praties.