The Canal House
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Daniel McFarland has refined the life of a war correspondent down to an art. He knows how to get information out of officials who won't talk. He knows how to find the one man with a car who can get you out of town. He knows how to judge the gravity of a situation in a war-torn area (it's a bad sign when the dogs are gone). And he knows how to get to the heart of an explosive story and emerge unscathed. To Daniel, getting the story is everything.
When a trip to a warlord's camp in Uganda goes awry and Daniel's companions end up dead, he has his first serious moment of reckoning with his lack of faith, his steely approach to life, and his cool dispatch of the people around him. And as he falls in love with Julia Cadell, an idealistic doctor, he begins to see the world anew. The two run off together to a canal house in the middle of London, where they find a refuge from their perilous lives.
But they can't ignore the real world forever and are soon persuaded to travel to East Timor, where the entire nation has become a war zone. As the militia prepares to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of refugees, Daniel must decide whether to get the story of a lifetime or to see beyond the headlines to the people whose lives are in the balance.
"This touching, elegantly written tale aptly describes love and friendship amid the terror of contemporary war."
-- The Dallas Morning News
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of exceptional importance that hasn't received a starred or boxed review.THE CANAL HOUSEMark Lee. Algonquin, (368p) Lee is an experienced foreign correspondent (who is currently also a vice-president at PEN Center USA), and his knowledge of the perils and challenges of that life comes across most powerfully in this somber and elegiac debut novel. It is the story of the life and death of war correspondent Daniel McFarland, who after a brush with death in Uganda develops a new sense of mission and responsibility toward those whose wracked lives he is covering. He is drawn into an affair with Julia Cadell, an English doctor who idealistically ministers to the suffering in war zones, and the book's title refers to a brief idyll they share in London before setting out again on dangerous missions. Their new one is in East Timor, where the Indonesian government is crushing an independence movement, while British and Australian troops, sent in by the UN, try to act as intermediaries without actually joining the fighting. The scenes on that idyllic island smashed by war are the best in the book they have the breathless immediacy of battlefront reporting and if Daniel's final decision is a bit melodramatic, a sad resolution is the only possible one for Lee's tale. A subplot about a wealthy British magnate in pursuit of Julia never quite convinces, and the narrator, a photographer who follows Daniel around, is a bit shadowy. But there's no denying the eloquence and terror of Lee's vistas of contemporary war in the world's more obscure corners. FYI:The current publicity around the movie version of Greene's The Quiet American could help refocus readers' attention on the role of the war correspondent, though the book's title and cover don't begin to convey its subject and quality.
