By Brynna Leslie
Alan Cumyn talks to me over the phone from what he describes as his cluttered and cramped home-office in Ottawa South.
He discusses his new novel in the level voice of one who is used to reading prose to an audience. Cumyn’s novel Burridge Unbound was recently nominated for the Giller Prize, Canada’s richest award for fiction, and he’s hoping the nomination will help him tap into the lucrative American market with this book, and its companion novel, Man of Bone.
But unlike New York, Paris or London, an Ottawa setting is not an automatic international market-grabber. Cumyn’s description of a water mulcher churning up dead leaves may be enough to draw Centretown residents into the novel — the setting is late autumn, and Cumyn’s main character, Bill Burridge, is walking along the paved bike path on the Rideau Canal — but our southern neighbours don’t have the same familiarity.
So if you want to go international, why set the scene in Canada’s capital?
Cumyn says Burridge, a former official with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the founder of a three-person human rights organization, couldn’t find a more natural setting than Ottawa.
“There is a lot of international humanitarian work that goes on here,” Cumyn says. “This is very much a city with an international focus.”
Although the internationally reputed Giller would help Cumyn make a name for himself outside Canada, the setting shift in Burridge Unbound to an island nation in the midst of a democratic revolution gives the novel a global political flare that can draw audiences in, no matter where they live.
The novel is a disturbing look at Burridge, a former Canadian diplomat suffering from severe post-traumatic stress after being the victim of a brutal terrorist kidnapping in the fictional Southeast Asian country of Santa Irene. Burridge’s emotional and physical fluctuations are told through a stream of consciousness as he struggles to let go of flashbacks and overcome his physical convulsions. After two years of medication and three suicide attempts, Burridge decides the only way to overcome his fear of living is to go back to Santa Irene to serve on a human rights tribunal.
Cumyn describes the events in his novel as being reminiscent of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or India in different periods.
Cumyn says his experience teaching in Indonesia and China in the eighties, along with nine years as a researcher at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, have been the inspiration for much of his work.
“I was researching some of the most troubled areas around the world,” says Cumyn. “I just let my imagination take over.”
Cumyn won’t find out until Nov. 2 if the $25,000 Giller Prize will be his.
For now, he hopes Burridge Unbound has the potential to appeal to an audience much larger than just those of us who understand why the Rideau Canal needs to be mulched in mid-September.