The Unyielding Clamour of the Night: from a Snow Covered Picnic Table in Quebec City to Revolt in the Tropics

Neil Bissoondath says that he couldn't get started on the book that would become his prize-winning The Unyielding Clamour of the Night until he drove down to the waterfront park on the St. Lawrence river in Quebec City, cleared the snow from a picnic table and began writing.

In interview in Quill and Quire, Bissoondath--born in Trinidad, nephew of Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, and a professor of création littéreaire at l'Université de Laval--explained "  this thing just flowed out of me. It went on, very unusually, for days and days, and I found that by the end of it I had about a hundred handwritten pages. And the whole story was there.”

 Creation like that isn't very common, but it seems even more unusual when you realize that the book Bissoondath was writing takes place during a civil war in an island nation that sounds a lot like Sri Lanka.  Was there some alchemy involved, some impulse to escape the winter?  Or a recognition of the safety of the corner of Canada that Bissoondath has called home for three decades?

He's never said to my knowledge, but obviously for him the process of writing a novel has somewhat mysterious life of its own.  He says he doesn't plot his book, and that in this case the idea of a young man with a wooden leg came to him casually when his brother-in-law showed him an old prosthesis he'd found in a barn in the Quebec countryside.  The object becomes essential to the story which ends in a way that will surprise many. To say more would be to spoil an experience that is far more than a simple story about insurrection.

Because that's what lies behind the story:  Arun, young educated man comes to teach in a village where the government is struggling to put down revolt: young man is disillusioned, young man learns some nasty secrets, young man takes sides. 

Bissoondath says he didn't do any special research for the book, and avoided reading about Sri Lanka to give himself the freedom to invent.  But I think he also drew skillfully, if unconsciously, on his experience in his peaceful adopted country.  Reference is made to the insect noises that fill the air on tropical night: Arun says at one point how the sound meant peace and comfort to him when he was a boy, but now in this war-torn country the insects are silent.

Sit at a picnic table on a Quebec summer night and you'll hear a similar nearly deafening symphony of crickets, cicadas and other creatures (the photo was taken in such a place.  The sound of a certain peace that Bissoondath  cherishes and which he has found far away from his imaginary country, and from the Trinidad of his childhood.

A very good book..