Scotiabank Giller Prize nominees explore basic questions
We’ve talked about four of the six books nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize on The Weekend Morning Show with Terry MacLeod. The final two, The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis and Tell by Frances Itani, both explore deeply personal and fundamental questions in an intimate setting.
The Betrayers is a tightly woven and suspenseful novel that reads like a play. The two main characters, both quite fleshed out for such a compact novel, represent complex moral and philosophical issues.
The book takes place over the course of 24 hours in a tiny Crimean village. Flashbacks take the reader to Jerusalem and Moscow.
Baruch Kotler is a former Soviet Jewish dissident who was betrayed by his roommate. The KGB can’t break him and he spends 13 years in a Soviet Gulag. When he is finally released and arrives in Israel, he is an international hero.
Twenty-five years later Kotler is a politician who still refuses to break. He won’t back the prime minister’s plan to relocate Jewish settlers from the West Bank. So his enemies splash his affair with a younger woman across the front pages of the paper.
The book opens as Kotler and his mistress run from the scandal to hide in a seaside village in Crimea. In what should be an improbable coincidence, but is really an effective tool for Bezmozgis to explore fate, faith and destiny, Kotler runs into the friend who betrayed him and sent him to prison – Vladimir Tankilevich.
So with this showdown, Bezmozgis can tackle big moral questions about integrity, absolute truth and mercy. Should Kotler forgive? Does Tankilevich even want or think he needs forgiveness? How can you judge when you don’t have all the facts – or as Tankilevich’s wife asks, “Who ever sat in judgment with all the facts? Facts were imposed by those who had the power to impose them.”
Ultimately, is Kotler a hero for his rigid refusal to compromise his morals? Or has the betrayed become the betrayer for the damage his choices cause his family and possibly even his country?
Choices are also at the centre of Frances Itani’s Tell. In this case, it is the choice to swallow your secrets or, as the title suggests, tell.
Kenan Oak has returned to his wife and his small Ontario town from the trenches of the First World War. He is damaged inside and out. He won’t talk about what he’s been through, and he won’t leave the house.
Kenan struggles with his memories from the battlefield while coming to terms with his own childhood mysteries. With disfiguring burns on his face, his wife’s uncle Am is one of the few people he feels comfortable with.
Meanwhile, Am and his wife Maggie are also dealing with the crippling fallout of their own family secret. The entire town knows their story, but no one ever talks about it. In “a grim kind of solidarity”, the town closes ranks to protect their own. The small town is both a curse and a comfort.
Itani’s characters are looking for hope and redemption as they struggle with their hidden nightmares. And the author has done a beautiful job of reflecting that juxtaposition in the setting — a small town on the edge of modernity.
It is a world grappling with the horrors of the Great War, while looking hopefully to a future with electric lights, automobiles and the cutting edge Christmas gift of 1919 — a watch your wife can wear on her wrist.
That hope is what pushes characters to tell, to share their secrets and to start to heal.
