bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2016), pp. 36–37
Editor’s Note: We have received two reviews. Harold Hickman, and one from an active FS L both for your reading pleasure.
EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES, by James Bartleman, 2015, Dundurn Press, 256 pp, $17.99.
Exceptional Circumstances by former Foreign Service Officer James Bartleman is a novel set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of the background is based on historic reality though at times the author creates a fictional version of events in Colombia, Cuba and Canada in which the main character, Luc Cadotte, plays a role.
The book is cast as Cadotte’s memoirs of his early career, written after his retirement in the early 2000s. At times one senses the author’s bureaucratic background emerging in the writing. Excerpts from fictional memos and letters of instruction are included. The table of contents almost appears to be that of a briefing book. However this, and the occasional anachronistic use of modern jargon, adds to the novel’s authenticity as the memoir of a bureaucrat written 30 years after the events took place.
Exceptional Circumstances is a good read, at times a compelling read. Bartleman provides good colour in his description of life both in Bogota and Havana. He has used author’s licence to move Cadotte, a young Métis Foreign Service Officer, up quickly through the ranks of the Foreign Service by providing him with a powerful sponsor who uses the talents of this junior officer to carry out tasks a more seasoned officer might question. As the focus of the novel is elsewhere, most of Bartleman’s characters, with the exception of Cadotte, are not fully developed nor multifaceted.
The clue to the motivation for this novel is at the front of the book, where a quotation from the New Scientist reads “Acts of torture can be committed by almost everyone — not just by psychopaths.”
Bartleman uses Exceptional Circumstances to present to the public a debate on current issues in Canada and s for James Bartleman’s latest book— one from David Kyffin. Since their reviews complement «
much of the western world. The debate is between measures some feel should be taken to combat perceived heightened security concerns versus responsibility of governments to respect the basic values of human rights.
Bartleman presents this debate through the recruitment and early career of Cadotte, who has an extraordinary early career as a result of his being thrust into intelligence assignments in Colombia and Cuba by the Director General of Security and Intelligence.
In Bogota, Cadotte manages to meet with a revolutionary priest, the charismatic leader of one of Colombia’s guerrilla movements, with the goal of determining if the guerrillas have had contact with the FLQ. Being a junior officer, with little experience in either intelligence or departmental functioning, Cadotte does not comprehend the use that will be made of the intelligence he gathers, but he does gain a reputation as a good operative.
Bartleman’s descriptions of life in Colombia give the novel authenticity as he captures the brutal nature of the poverty and of all the participants in the ugly combination of revolution and class warfare which took place in this time frame. He describes with accuracy the desperate situation of those trapped in absolute poverty in Colombia, particularly the plight of abandoned children.
Following Bogota and a several month stint in Ottawa, Cadotte is then posted to Cuba. In addition to his day job as deputy ambassador, he is tasked as a CIA operative to gather information for the USA. The details of the assignment in the novel are fiction, but the arrangement is not fictional. As Bartleman points out in “A Conversation with the Author” at the end of the novel, a current member of the bout de papier editorial board, John Graham, as a junior officer posted to Cuba, carried out intelligence duties on behalf of the CIA with the full knowledge of the Canadian government.
Following his abrupt return to Canada from Havana, Cadotte’s | Fyeeptional experiences iD Cumstances gp lead to him be com- Rude ing the departmental expert on international ter- James Bartleman rorism. In short order he is pulled into the vortex of the government’s response to the 1970 October Crisis. Here Bartleman again changes the historic details, with the victims of the kidnappings becoming the American Consul General and a fictional minister of tourism.
The debate, present in many forms in the novel, between perceived security needs and the respect for human rights in exceptional circumstances, is brought to a head. Cadotte accompanies a captured member of the FLQ on her deportation flight to Bogota. Though she is a dual Canadian-Colombian national, her Canadian citizenship has been stripped. Cadotte has been tasked with getting her to reveal the location of the kidnapped American Consul General who is being held by another FLQ cell. If she does not reveal this information before the end of the flight, she is to be handed over to Colombian secret police to be tortured to obtain the information.
Bartleman uses these fictional circumstances to enhance the debate and clearly demonstrate the consequences of using the questionable tools such as of stripping of citizenship and the “contracting out” of torture. The novel points to the ease with which such violations of human rights could be sanctioned, when governments are faced with what they perceive are exceptional circumstances.
Harold Hickman is a former editor of bout de papier who has served in Colombia, Peru, Chile and Uruguay.
EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES, by James Bartleman, 2015, Dundurn Press, 256 pp, $17.99.
A well-known and often-repeated injunction to aspiring writers of fiction is “write what you know”. The wisdom of that advice, as it relates to the emotional content of a piece, is counterbalanced by the clear risk of staying too close to lived events. At what point does writing what you know become merely fictionalized autobiography? Having read and enjoyed James Bartleman’s memoirs Out of Muskoka and On Six Continents — which respectively relate the former lieutenant governor’s beginnings as a half-Indian youth in rural Ontario and his subsequent diplomatic career — I came to his third novel Exceptional Circumstances with high hopes and an open mind. I was mostly left with a sense that it might be better appreciated by someone less familiar with the author’s prior work and with the Foreign Service.
Written in the form of an autobiographical memoir, Exceptional Circumstances focuses mainly on the early diplomatic career of Luc Cadotte, a mid-twenties francophone Métis Foreign Service Officer from a very modest small-town Ontario background. After briefly covering a few formative incidents in his early years, the narrative follows his rise from his Foreign Affairs recruitment interview, to the development of a specialization in international terrorism through short postings in Bogota and Havana, to a role in the October Crisis of 1970. Although Excentional Circumstances deals with to his difficulties finding someone compatible to settle down with, to expository passages about the foreign service and international affairs in the late 1960s.
A further difficulty is the strained believability of the plot. With a similar personal background and approach to life, the protagonist Cadotte seems to be an idealized stand-in for the author and comes complete with a photographic memory. Handpicked right out of university by a senior manager
At what point does writing what you know become merely
fictionalized autobiography?
with big plans for his future, he finds himself within two years the deputy head of mission in a Caribbean country of major geopolitical relevance. His incidental contact with FLQ radicals, during which the fe/quistes brag that they are planning the classic “something big” to Cadotte knowing full well he is a Canadian diplomat, makes Cadotte the de facto Foreign Affairs expert on terrorism at the age of 27, placing him near the centre of decision-making and lining him up for recruitment by the shadowy cabal of senior civil servants that really runs Ottawa. Even allowing for the historical setting and a fair degree of artistic licence, this account of an early foreign service career is surprisingly heavy on gaining field experience at senior management level, and light on time in a standard-issue Ottawa office drafting briefings and reports.
Tlltimatelvw Cadatte’« metenric rice creating some arbitrary personal difficulties for him, with little thematic intersection with the main storyline.
As an epilogue to the novel, the publisher included an “interview” with the author where he elaborates on the issues dealt with in the narrative. It is an interesting read as the reflections of a former senior diplomat and national-security advisor to Prime Minister Chrétien, and surpasses the preceding novel in its clarity. It suggests that the author’s strengths are in non-fiction, and that a more direct approach might have served these issues better than a story which is half Bartleman and half Bond.
David Kyffin joined DFATD in 2011 as a Foreign Policy and Diplomacy Service officer following a brief private-sector legal career in Montreal. He was assigned to Canada’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York in 2012 and currently works in the United Nations Division in Ottawa.
Elizabeth
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2016), pp. 36–37. Read the rest of this issue →
