Book review: Time does not heal all wounds
“Hate is the father of all things.”
So says one of the characters in The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, a book that deals with the consequences of ethnic rivalry, the lasting effects of war and the struggle to find a home in the face of ongoing conflict.
This is the fourth novel by Steven Heighton who is also a poet and was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2016 for his collection The Waking Comes Late.
The book is set in Cyprus, an island that has been divided between Greek and Turkish sectors in the aftermath of a war that started when the Turks invaded in 1974 in order to stop Cyprus from uniting with Greece.
Elias Trifannis, a corporal in the Canadian army, is on trauma leave on Cyprus visiting relatives after a horrific experience while serving in Afghanistan. He is thrown into the midst of the ongoing Turkish and Greek hostilities when he is falsely accused of raping a Turkish journalist and injuring a Turkish soldier who supposedly came to her aid.
Fleeing for his life, Elias finds shelter in what is thought to be an abandoned town in the neutral zone between the Greek and Turkish sectors. The town, Varosha, is actually home to a small hidden community that includes residents who did not want to leave their homes when hostilities broke out and an assortment of misfits and runaways.
The survival of this group is made possible through the collusion of Erkan Kaya, a left-leaning colonel in the Turkish army. Exceedingly charming and corrupt, he is willing to live and let live and is focused on a daily routine that includes sun bathing, tennis, good food and drink and the occasional tryst with the dancers that perform at a nearby holiday resort.
Kaya is sympathetic towards the inhabitants of Varosha and sees no need to expel them from the neutral zone. Unfortunately, Kaya’s outlook is not shared and that has tragic consequences for the small community. Elias’ finding refuge in Varosha sorely tests the ability of Colonel Kaya to ensure that the community is able to stay hidden and intact.
In addition to Colonel Kaya, Heighton’s novel is populated with an array of characters, many of whom are motivated by the need to address past grievances and are unable to put the island’s violent history behind them. One of the characters comes to the realization that while he had thought he had escaped history, “it had only taken a sabbatical.” Another character asks, “he who cannot hate purely, how can he love?”
The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep is a novel that examines how war can leave an indelible mark on past and future generations and illustrates how people can neither forgive nor forget. It is very much a novel of the time in that it deals with people displaced and uprooted by war struggling to find a home.
