Seven Oaks Magazine.

Madeleine Thien follows her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, Simple Recipes, with Certainty, a first novel that chronicles the entwining experiences of several characters, spanning generation, geography, politics, and culture. The tales of different individuals – each given a separate chapter of the novel – are allowed space to unfold and develop, but link back to an overall narrative hub. The novel’s title conveys its recurrent existential theme: the desire in all of us to make comprehensible, to make coherent, the mysteries that pervade our lives.

Gail Lim, the novel’s central protagonist who, in the novel’s present-day, is being mourned by her family and partner, spends the last period of her life attempting to piece together, and hence make certain, her family’s history during the dark age of Japan’s occupation of British North Borneo during the Second World War. She is a gutsy, itinerant radio documentary producer for the CBC with a passion for excavating historical truth through the audio medium. Fascinated by the body’s aural ability to find meaning in subtlety – the tonality and hesitations in an interviewee’s dialogue can represent a thousand words, for example – her fact-finding journeys are rendered engrossing by the haunting voices and sounds captured on her tape recorder, rewound and replayed.

We witness Ansel, Gail’s partner, painfully moving on after her death. Through his memory, we get glimpses into his late partner’s life: her dedication to her work, her talent, the independent spirit that compelled her to leave town in order to find missing links to her stories. Thien effectively explores Gail’s character not only through Ansel’s memories of her, but also through his listening sessions of her radio documentaries, some of which is material that is yet-to-be-aired or incomplete. Gail’s voice and knowledge are transmitted through these partial audio clips, a means by which her legacy remains vivid in the world of the living. The couple’s relationship – metamorphosing through phases of passion, beauty, betrayal, and guilt – is written in detail, Thien avoiding finger pointing prose and, instead, cultivating within the reader a yearning to empathize with them both.

We also witness her parents, Matthew and Clara Lim, attempting a life of normalcy six months after the death of their daughter, their memories providing information – some of which only the reader knows, and of which Gail will never find out – to their past: Matthew’s escape from North Borneo in the wake of the murder of a loved one is a pivotal part of the novel. This tragedy, combined with the profound relationship he had with a girl, Ani, from his childhood – lasting their years apart and bringing them back together in their adult lives – will ultimately affect the course of his marriage to Clara.

Time is a significant device that Thien plays with, as she creates strata of the present, memory, and flashback throughout the work – descriptive passages translate into smooth transitions through time, these changeovers never reaching unnecessary, obfuscating complexity. Mentions of scientific and philosophical discovery are liberally strewn throughout the novel: generous references to Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, cryptography, and cosmology are made over the course of the book, indicative of the intellectual curiosities of the characters and their exhaustive search for explanations of certainty.

The novel’s present takes place in Vancouver – the city where the Lims ultimately decide to raise Gail after immigrating to Canada, a station anchoring their daughter even as her journalistic passions send her around the world in search of stories. Having rarely read any authors who locate their stories in Vancouver’s Chinese-populated regions –areas such as Strathcona, here – I warmed to Thien’s novel early on, simply because such descriptive passages of Vancouver evoked my own fondness of the city. Thien’s poetically assembled passages of setting are among the novel’s most stunning literary illustrations. This detailed portrait of Strathcona conveys the author’s mature and lyrical observations of the everyday:

Standing at the window, [Gail] can see a dozen tai chi practitioners gathered in the nearby schoolyard, moving, out-of-phase, in lengthening ballet. Elderly men and women flick their heels, stretch their arms away from their bodies, turn with a strange and gorgeous precision. Movement after movement unfolding, an ongoing tide, spreading towards the edges. (page 211)

Both Strathcona and Chinatown are clever places to locate the novel– because most residents living in these communities have had to painfully absorb the impacts of Japanese war crimes, the reader is immersed in a world where this past is inescapable, the people close to the main characters are living, breathing reminders of this history. Employing Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia as political backdrop to her stories, Thien courageously calls back to a time in history that many have chosen to obliterate from memory – a reasonable response if you are war victim, an egregious one if you are aggressor – and incorporates the historical record into her fictional work.

Thien’s debut novel is thoughtfully and lovingly written, easily putting her on the list of Canadian writers to watch for in years to come. With the (white, Anglo-Saxon) Canadian literary canon in the process of being revised to legitimate voices that were, until recently, excluded, works like Certainty are critical in helping to reverse this historical tendency. Madeleine Thien’s enormous success will further inspire young Asian women to pen their stories confidently and with entitlement, a promising indication that talent from amongst our ranks won’t go unnoticed.