The Time in Between (30 page)

Discuss the various possible meanings of the title
The Time In
Between
.

Tomas Manik and Hoang Vu are visual artists; Vu is also a writer, as is the elusive Dang Tho. Each has a different status in society. Consider these differences and discuss what Bergen is saying about the Artist and how he is regarded in Vietnam, as opposed to in North America or in Europe. Discuss in what ways being artists have shaped Vu’s and Dang Tho’s lives.

David Bergen wrote that Ada Boatman was “given some sort of gift” from Vu, her Vietnamese lover. Discuss Ada and Vu’s relationship. What do you think the gift was?

The Boatmans are an American/Canadian family temporarily in Vietnam; the Goudses are Americans planning a longer stay. How do these characters try (or not try) to understand something of Vietnam? What assumptions do they arrive with? What, if anything, does Vietnam teach them? At one point, as she leaves Vu and returns to Danang, Ada becomes “aware that a window had been flung open onto a view of an alien and foreign place, and then, just as suddenly, it had closed”. What brings Ada to that moment? Do you think the author is making a general point about Westerners in foreign cultures?

David Bergen says he doesn’t see his book as a war novel. How would you describe the book’s relationship to war? Are Charles’s experiences universal wartime ones? Could they have taken place in World War I or II, or in the American Civil War? Or is there something about his killing of the boy in particular that seems specific to this war?

The Vietnamese veterans of the war, as well as the civilians, deal with their memories of the war quite differently than the Americans do. How would you characterize these differences, giving instances from as many characters on both sides as you can?

The Time In Between
is concerned with conflict on two vastly different levels—with the Vietnam War, and with the struggles within the Boatman family between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. Discuss these conflicts. Does Bergen suggest any connection between the public and private struggles in the novel?

Charles Boatman carries a terrible secret for years, but he’s not the only person in the novel with a secret. The Boatman family has its share, some of which have been revealed before the trip to Vietnam, some of which come to light later. Elaine and Jack Gouds also have secrets. Discuss these various secrets and their connections to the book’s themes.

Structurally,
The Time In Between
is unusual in that the body of Charles Boatman is found about one hundred pages before the end of the book. The “quest” in the novel, in that sense, ends early. Or does it? What significant things happen after the discovery of the body—and can only happen, as a matter of fact, once Charles’s fate is known?

The most prominent of the five senses in this novel is that of smell. How does Bergen use the sense of smell in the story, and why does it seem so important?

There are two blind characters in this book—the blind soldier befriended by Kiet in the Vietnamese novel Charles reads, and the blind American veteran Ada meets in a cafe. When Charles’s body is found, fish have eaten away his eyes. What is the significance of blindness in
The Time In Between
?

Charles tells his children stories while they sit in the bunker he builds, and Ada believes that “each successive story was like a piece of thread, and she was collecting those pieces”. Stories play a crucial role in this novel: the various versions Charles tells about his war experiences; the story that Kiet tells to save his life in the Vietnamese novel-within-a-novel (another story in itself ); the life stories that characters do and don’t want to tell or hear. What is the author saying about the role of stories in our lives, and in the lives of the book’s characters?

When Ada disbelieves Elaine Gouds’s description of her relationship with Charles, “She saw that sex could leap out of nowhere and obscure a person, make them stupid” [p.169]. Who else does this happen to in the novel? How do various characters in the novel approach sexuality?

“Safe” is an important word and concept in
The Time In Between
. Characters promise to watch over each other and their belongings. Charles builds a bunker to keep his children safe. Having read Bergen’s novel, what kinds of safety do you think he believes are possible?

Charles says that there is “nothing better for trust than hunting,” as he invites Tomas to go hunting with him. In the novel, there are several acts of violence against animals. How do they connect with the main story and its themes?

The young Vietnamese boy, Yen, tells Ada that “everybody wanted something that they couldn’t have”. What are the characters’ impossible wishes? Are they the things that Yen tells Ada, or shows her, about herself?

DAVID BERGEN is the author of four highly acclaimed novels:
A Year of Lesser
(1996), a
New York Times
Notable Book and winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award;
See the Child
(1999);
The Case of
Lena S. (2002), winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction; and
The Time In Between
, winner of the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is also the author of a collection of short fiction,
Sitting Opposite My Brother
(1993), which was a finalist for the Manitoba Book of the Year. Bergen won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000. He lived and taught in Southeast Asia for three and a half years, and currently lives with his wife and four children in Winnipeg.

ALSO BY DAVID BERGEN

The Case of Lena S.
See the Child
A Year of Lesser
Sitting Opposite My Brother

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2005 by David Bergen

Reading group guide © 2006 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bergen, David.
The time in between: a novel / David Bergen.
p. cm.

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction.
2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Canadians—Vietnam—Fiction.
4. British Columbia—Fiction. 5. Divorced fathers—Fiction.
6. Missing persons—Fiction. 7. Vietnam—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9199.3.B413T56 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004051495

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eISBN: 978-0-307-43268-1

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