Exile
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Ann Ireland |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A novel |
| Publisher | Dundurn Press |
| Honors | |
| For Carlos Romero Estevez, freedom from danger means a life in exile. Rescued from his home in a Latin American military dictatorship—where his writings have been banned and he is wanted by the state—the poet and journalist is brought to a new home in Vancouver. His rescuers, a group devoted to helping oppressed writers, think they’ve found a hero, a posterboy. Carlos thinks he’s found a new life, new freedom, and new, powerful friends. But soon everyone’s illusions are dispelled, and Carlos finds life in exile to be a new kind of prison. | |
If you think political refugees who seek asylum in Canada are romantic figures, you need to meet Carlos Romero Estevez, the feckless antihero of Ann Ireland’s third novel, Exile. Carlos hails from a fictional Latin American country named Santa Clara, where he was a journalist who fell afoul of the country’s most powerful general for purely personal, not political, reasons. After hiding out in a friend’s basement for four months, Carlos suddenly gets shipped to Vancouver where a group of earnest academic do-gooders have sponsored his asylum and landed him a cushy writer-in-exile gig at the university. The book plays back and forth between the expectations of the naive Canadians who are looking for a suitably grateful hero to worship and the selfish lifestyle of Carlos himself—he refuses to give up smoking, drinking, and steak dinners even as they break his benefactors’ budget; he’s used to having impoverished female servants around to do his cooking and laundry for him; and he hits on every likely female student or instructor who crosses his path.
Ann Ireland is a sly, imaginative, and award-winning writer whose previous novels have shown her fascination with the interplay between innocent North Americans and exotic foreigners (A Certain Mr. Takahashi) and between young female students and older teachers (The Instructor). Ireland’s stint as president of PEN Canada undoubtedly opened her eyes to the tensions between the artistic and political lives of writers around the world and the desire of the Canadian cultural community to help (but only according to our rather bland and flat-footed rules). She paints these two solitudes with great wit and cunning observation. —Bronwyn Drainie
