In The Company Of Angels by Thomas E. Kennedy
Bloomsbury $39.99
Copenhagen in the early 1990s. Bernardo Greene is a patient at a Clinic for Torture Victims. In his native Chile, he'd been tortured for two years by the Pinochet regime. Now, dressed in drab clothes so he's less likely to be noticed, he wanders a vividly realised, safe new city, amazed and appalled at the indifference with which people treat their freedom, waking at night still torn by terrors.
In Chile he was a school-teacher who told his class about a poet, deemed subversive by the government, who had died in prison. A parent complained.
That was enough to make Pinochet's secret police move to destroy him, because "to break the spirit of such a man is to break the spirit of those who looked to him for their identity".
His ruined hand restored, but his spirit still maimed, Bernardo first sees Michaela at a cafe. Her eyes of blue fire meet his over a cup of coffee, but don't let that put you off - even if Kennedy does have a few more similar lapses.
She's also a victim of violence and degradation. She's also seen family obliterated. So in another way has the novel's third main narrator: the doctor who tries to heal Bernardo by taking him back to the place of screaming, finding with him "how much must remain of a survivor for him to be called a man".
The torture specifics are utterly horrible, and utterly necessary if we're to comprehend the potential of humans for brutality and recovery. Both Michaela and Bernardo believe themselves too damaged to live properly again, but slowly they find themselves helping each other towards some sort of wholeness.
It's a route that twists through all sorts of barbed wire and man-traps. Happiness and contentment are circled warily, even the tango they dance is an act of estrangement. Ever so gradually they edge towards a reconciliation and a tenuous hope, with "no words of bogus solace".
Told in brief, gaunt chapters and language that is both bare and emblematic, this is a grave, brave book, both terrible and tender.
Thomas Kennedy is apparently largely unknown in his native United States. Anyone reading In the Company of Angels will want to make sure he becomes very well known in New Zealand.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
