A Grave In the Air

Globe and Mail, January 19, 2008
Stephen Henighan’s provocative collection of essays. When Worlds Deny the World (2002), took on the Canadian literary establishment, hitting certain celebrated writers, the Giller Prize and big bad Toronto. Those of us who live beyond TorLit might agree that much of what he wrote then and has written since needed to be said. But the roar of Zeus-like critical thunder ringing in one’s ears doesn’t make it easy to get into his fictional world. The list of dos and don’ts Henighan set down is precise and confident, and so closely allied with his own artistic development that a reader feels compelled to ask whether he takes his own advice. And if so, does it work?

A Grave in the Air is a collection of eight stories set amid political events in Eastern and Central Europe, spanning the half-century between Nazi Germany and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. The narrative voices are wide-ranging, from a Polish chambermaid’s ruminations about the cultural cost of exile, to a Hungarian immigrant’s alienation from the anglo elite of Montreal. These are meaty stories, packed with significant public events. Not a whiff of high-blown poetry or the oblique psychology he so thoroughly detests in the “self-consciously artistic artifacts” of literary fiction. Rigorously obeying his stated aesthetic, this writing is indeed a victory of history over metaphor.

Multilingual, well-travelled and well-informed about the events that inspire his fiction, Henighan cannot resist observing social context, sometimes to the detriment of simple, evocative prose. In A Sense of Time, a wonderful story, possibly the best in the book, a middle-aged editor is reliving a lonely stint he once spent as a grad student in London, when he meets a woman who once pressed herself on him in the library stalls. They didn’t have sex then and they never do, but the realization of what might have been creates a melancholy erotic edge.

As they walk together, “Darkness had fallen and the neon logos of the chain stores that had driven away the family businesses Emmett remembered were gleaming in the chill mist that was not quite rain.” Did he really need to mention the plight of shopkeepers? He can’t seem to take his eyes off the big picture even when the moment calls for a close-up.
This penchant for public context seems more natural in the book’s title story. The central character is a disaffected journalist who covered the Bosnian war in the 1990s, and hasn’t been able to disengage emotionally or forge much of a personal life. Hoping to heal his soul, he is drawn back to the unfinished story of a Muslim family he knew during the conflict.
Stories set closer to home carry the grumpiness that overtakes Henighan whenever he thinks of Toronto. Beyond Bliss seems to personify history through the perky imperialist Vivian, an English girl who follows her rich boyfriend to Toronto in the 1960s. Desperate to get a leg up in the emerging publishing scene, she uses sex and cunning to force her way into a position of power.

The “lugubrious voice of Leonard Cohen maundered from the cafe’s transistor radio” while her future partner declared they would he famous some day: “Ray’s smile folded in on itself in the aggressively complacent expression lhat Torontonians adopted when asserting their importance in the face of Canadian insignificance.” It isn’t clear whether the observation is Vivian’s or the author’s, though they seem to share their contempt for the city.

Henighan has praised the linked story collection as a Canadian invention. Politics, displacement and fractured Europeanness provide an obvious connection here, yet the strongest, most affecting thread is that several characters are inhabited by the ghost of a lonely, clever guy who lives out a recurring story; nights of ecstasy with a powerful, dynamic woman followed by abandonment. The hot and cold of carnal love is a leitmotif. Henighan’s wide-angle view, so crisply rendered, could benefit from attention to such shadows.

Canadian Literature, April 2008
Stephen Henighan’s A Grave in the Air consists of eight stories, including the title work which, taking up approximately one-third of the book, is more novella than short story. Most of them involve European political conflicts, generally in the post-1989 “world order,” and they explore the problematic effects of national identity on the characters, who include a young Polish woman, a Bosnian Muslim girl posing as a Slovenian, and a Hungarian-Canadian observing from an outsider’s perspective the way that Anglo-Montrealers are adjusting to their changing position in Quebec. Two stories focus on the sometimes difficult, sometimes comic relationships between Canadians and English people. While Henighan’s characters are often made uncomfortable by the past they carry around with them, attempting to forget the past creates even more problems.

The personal relationships of the characters in these stories are generally transient and insecure, torn apart or prevented by the historical events that are omnipresent. Recurrently they long for the kind of life that people in less troubled times or situations simply take for granted as “normal,” when a sporting event is not overshadowed by politics, and sexual attraction is not countered by ethnic or linguistic divides. I was initially troubled by the sketchiness of some of Henighan’s characterization, but as I read more of the stories, this seemed part of his point. Life is always elsewhere in these stories, and the extent to which self-transformation is possible is limited by circumstance.

The outstanding title piece focuses on a Canadian foreign correspondent named Darryl who has taken a leave from reporting, and who is haunted by the atrocities he witnessed in Bosnia. In Germany, he encounters a Bosnian girl who initially doesn’t want to hear his story about the fate of her uncle, whom Darryl got to know while reporting on the civil war. “A grave in the air” is a quotation from Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge,” and the story begins with an epigraph from this poem in both German and English. The relationship of language to identity is an important theme not only in this story but in the book as a whole; Henighan observes the politics of language in both Montreal and the former Yugoslavia, while in “A Grave in the Air,” Darryl reflects on the different implications of “I lived in East Germany” and “Das war die DDR-Zeit.” Darryl has to decide whether to testify about the Bosnian genocide in a British trial, and his decision is influenced not only by his encounter with the Bosnian girl but by his awareness that Weimar, where the story is set, is “just down the road” from Buchenwald, which sinister name, Henighan reminds us, means “beech wood.” As a witness to atrocity, Darryl seems to speak for Henighan when he tells his editor that if we can no longer remember our history then “we’re all heading in the same direction as Yugoslavia.” A Grave in the Air is the product of a serious, unflinching moral imagination. These stories are often uncomfortable reading, but they are important reading, the work of a writer who looks hard at the complexities and rebarbative elements of the multicultural, globalized world we live in.

Times Literary Supplement, December 7, 2007
The eight stories in Stephen Henighan’s new collection, A Grave in the Air, ask what it is to be an outsider. Characters are repeatedly set apart, alien to the culture, social class, or era in which they move. Immigrants, refugees, foreign correspondents and others struggle to maintain their identities when the structures which once defined them have altered or disappeared.

“The Killing Past” turns on a man’s difficult relationship with what has gone before. Bart’s family emigrated to Canada from Britain, and the resulting discontinuity still unnerves him. He becomes increasingly devoted to investigating the family legend of his great-grandfather, A. B. Chevret, who attempted to make fair play an antidote to war. Chevret, who was haunted by the terrible human cost of the First World War, traveled with a team of amateur footballers throughout the Axis countries, preaching sportsmanship. More than half a century later, Bart follows his trail, hoping to discover a new sense of self. At home Bart’s girlfriend considered him a faux-immigrant who cannot understand what it means to be displaced; in Germany, he is a brash, new-worlder, exhuming what many believe best forgotten. That the tribalism Chevret challenged couldn’t be overcome in 1939, we know; that the same forces will doom Bart’s quest is the unhappy suspicion at the heart of the story.
Alienation can also be domestic, and some find themselves strangers within their own families. In “Freedom Square”, Doina, a young woman with ambitions to become a photographer, explains why she wants to leave Romania to work in Germany, but “her mother’s dark eyes were already foreign”. A shared vision has become impossible, and Doina’s homecoming, like many here, will be unfulfilling.

The title story brings all these themes skillfully together, when Latifa, a young Bosnian Muslim living in Germany, learns her family history from Darryl, a Canadian ex-journalist who would rather forget the former Yugoslavia. Darryl works for a cultural programme, but has been sent a fax asking him to attend a war-crimes tribunal. Faced with a return to his difficult past, he contemplates escaping into art, “something that lasts”. Culture and history are inseparable, however, and his hastily constructed ivory tower crumbles when Latifa arrives with a rock band he is chaperoning in Weimar. Recognizing her surname as that of a Bosnian friend, Darryl approaches her, but Latifa tells him she “will never be Bosnian again”: she is Slovenian now. Shocked and frustrated by her denials, Darryl must face his own past. He recalls Sarajevo, where he stayed on long after his editors lost interest, and Srebrenica. Perhaps no one has come that far; Bosnia is, after all, “down the road from Buchenwald”, a symbol of inhumanity that lies just outside the city. Latifa’s family have hidden their background from her. Although her detachment is honest, it seems nevertheless to have left her feeling empty. Darryl’s detachment is self-imposed, but the effects are similar. The happiness of both depends on their shared journey into memory, however difficult, and on accepting the terrible past.

This is the most poignant of Henighan’s themes: the importance of human action in the face of a terrible political and historical impotence (despite what the reader already knows to be the truth). He is not shy of the twentieth century’s big subjects, and he puts them to effective use. “The Killing Past”, which opens the book, and the title story, which closes it, are especially successful at bringing out the strange tension of tales whose outcomes are already known to us through history. The effect depends on uncompromisingly direct prose, coupled with direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings, so that we ourselves are never foreign to these tales of foreignness. This can have its drawbacks, when the author simply reports a character’s emotional state and moves on. A coolness sometimes threatens to settle across the pages — but Henighan’s underlying humanity, his interest in the average person in often less than average circumstance, almost always warms things up again.
— Tadzio Marin Koelb

Geist (Winter 2007)
Stephen Henighan’s new book, A Grave in the Air (Thistledown), is a collection of short stories set in Canada, England, Germany, Poland, Romania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which deal with themes of migration, immigration, foreignness, love, lust, adultery, violence, torture and more. Of the eight stories, two stand out. “Nothing Wishes to be Different” is an account of a Romanian man who fights in the Second World War, then returns to Romania, gets married and has children, then takes up the fight against the Communists and is caught, jailed and tortured; Henighan’s strong narrative prose moves this story forward with rhythm and purpose, and he leaves out much of the detail that weighs down on some of the other stories. “A Grave in the Air,” a novella with alternating narrative arcs, is indicative of the mixed quality of the remainder of the book. One arc follows a reporter, Darryl, who covers the Bosnian war as he takes a summer off in Germany; Henighan offers an affecting portrait of a man who is emotionally exhausted by his job; but the dialogue is flat, and details hinder the storytelling. The other arc follows Darryl a few years earlier, during the war in Bosnia. There a Bosnian man tells Darryl about this father, a Muslim holy man who wandered throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina until Chetniks killed him during World War II. The story is intriguing because one character tells it to another: the narrator tells us in plain language what happened, without the literary techniques that are commonly deployed for effect but often cloud a story.
— Michal Kozlowski

Quill & Quire, November 2007
The eight stories that comprise author and combative literary critic Stephen Henighan’s new collection of short fiction, most of them set in Central Europe, deftly capture the isolation and disconnectedness of the outsider through expatriate status, class divisions, and ideology.

Henighan’s writing is technically faultless, but often strays into a dry, journalistic style that makes it harder for readers to connect emotionally with the stories’ characters. While some authors naturally follow the ‘less is more’ aesthetic, for others it becomes merely an exercise in reduction and constriction. In these stories, Henighan is more firstly in the latter category, and one gets the sense that a lot of compelling prose got stripped away in the interests of efficiency and fashionable minimalism. Like a close room with little fresh air, the lack of vibrancy in the prose can become a touch yawn-inducing.

If these stories do not exactly thrill with bursts of lyricism, they do resonate with intelligence, thoughtfulness, and perceptiveness. The longish title story follows an expat Canadian journalist’s attempts to deal with his disillusionment and emotional confusion after covering the Bosnian conflict. The story’s historical weight carries it and ensures its relevance. Without such weighty issues, the rest of the stories, though still enjoyably engaging, are best suited to those who like their ice cream vanilla, their darts rubber-tipped, and their milk warm. — Gavin Babstock