And therein lies the difficulty with this book. It is both a love story and a searing account of the Rwandan genocide. At his best, Courtemanche recites the litany of atrocity with powerful journalistic detachment; at his worst, he superimposes on that horror an unconvincing love affair and a woolly minded moral philosophy.

The main character in the novel is the journalist Valcourt, middle aged and world weary. He waits for a ‘scrap of life to excite him’ and ultimately finds it in Rwanda. At the cocktail hour by the swimming pool of the Hotel des Milles-Collines, he surveys with distaste the White international community - aid workers, international experts, prostitutes, paratroopers - as it gathers to socialise, talk business, and wonder when the atrocity (which all know is coming) will happen; he also ponders the Black contingent, in particular the President of Rwanda’s appalling nephews. One is a political scientist who sends death squads after Tutsis (Courtemanche’s irony is wonderful.)

Valcourt is vitriolic about the people by the pool. The women have cellulite, or are scrawny – their flesh clings to them ‘from habit’. (most women are judged visually in this book). The men are greedy wheeler-dealers, indulge in ‘perpetual squawking’ and are in ‘perpetual rut’, particularly when it comes to Rwandan flesh, ‘their territory of exploration.’

Around the pool, buzzards, jackdaws, and ravens hover hopefully in the trees, the chilling accompaniment to the genocide which will devastate the Tutsi population.

So far, so horrible, and so beautifully written.

Valcourt’s love interest, 20 year old Gentille, does not suffer from cellulite and her flesh is magnificently proportioned. Valcourt is so fascinated by her ‘tits and ass’ that, wearingly, he rarely misses an opportunity to mention them.

The Hutu Gentille is pale and tall and so is often taken for a Tutsi, a dangerous thing to be. Equally dangerous is her great beauty. All men lust after Gentille in their casually insulting way. But Valcourt’s feelings for her are different. He may suffer from instant erection at the sound of her voice, but he is not like the other Whites, exploitative and ‘in perpetual rut’. No, Valcourt loves. He reads her poetry and thrills to her sexual response at the mere sound of his voice, while he admires her tits and ass. When the relationship deepens, he admires T & A even more, and she is cosmically, almost comically, ecstatic. Gentille becomes a woman under Valcourt’s tutelage, turns literary, and learns to say naughty words like ‘tits and ass’ to please him. It is difficult to keep patience with this Pygmalion romance, the creation of male vanity and wishful thinking; especially when it gets in the way of the genocide for which the scene was set so powerfully and movingly.

All around Rwanda, outbreaks of murder occur. The Hutus, incited to organised ethnic ‘cleansing’ by the government, are building up to a Tutsi Holocaust. Valcourt’s role is to witness and rant. He is an unpleasant character in many ways, burning with self-righteous rage and prone to long winded polemical lecturing. He dumps huge tracts of condemnatory information about various Aid agencies on the pages of the book, and leaves the reader with no way of evaluating the truth of what he says since he appoints himself sole judge and interpreter of their conduct. This is both poor novel writing and poor journalism.

The most pitiful victims of the Rwandan Holocaust are the women and children. Here, Courtemanche is at his most powerful and moving. The reader will not soon forget the fates of Émérita, Gentille and Alice. But a curious double standard pertains. The death of a prostitute at the hands of a Belgian is rightly met with anger and contempt on Valcourt’s part. But the infection of women en masse by Aids -ridden feckless Cyprien is associated with Rwandan love for life and unquenchable virility. Cyprien is philosophical – all will die of something, and they might as well catch their death ‘in pleasure’. After his own wife is brutally raped and abused by militiamen, Cyprien is forced to copulate with her for their amusement. Cyprien is relieved that he is not going to die of Aids, but ‘in pleasure’. As he lies with that agonised battered woman, Cyprien reflects shockingly that ‘never had he had such an erection.’ That Cyprien died in this way is a fact; that he thought such a thing is Valcourt’s interpretation. This is a particularly queasy example of the difficulty of ‘faction’ writing. Where exactly does fact end and fiction begin? How far does the novelist have the right to impose his own view on a dead man?

Méthode‘s wish for a beautiful death is granted by Valcourt and friends. He dies of AIDS while being fellated by a prostitute, with his mother spectating. Apparently there is no occasion to which a Rwandan male cannot rise, and apparently women have only one purpose and that is to please men, even unto death. Valcourt’s moral judgement, so stringently applied to some people, is suspended when it comes to others. Justin, the hotel pool boy treats white women badly. He seduces like an animal, degrades them, and dumps them. Valcourt assists in this war of revenge (being a pool boy necessitates some kind of revenge after all). The discovery that Justin is deliberately infecting the women with AIDS earns him no more than a mild reproof from Crusader Valcourt, who sees no common link between this sexual terrorism (the white women were distinctly tacky), the brutal misogyny of the Hutu militiamen (Tutsi women are all whores anyway), and sexual exploitation by Whites (that’s what they are there for, isn’t it?)

Gentille’s and Valcourt’s great love does not triumph in the end. Mutiliated by miliatiamen, Gentille cannot bear Valcourt to see her, a wish with which he complies. In the end, all pity and compassion belong to the women of Rwanda who have to share the earth with the men presented here.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.