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| Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain – review | Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain – review |
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| Novels about the Iraq war remain scarce, but within this small literary subset Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, published last year, is the current ranking officer. It seems less surprising that a Dallas house-husband with no military experience should choose Iraq as his subject when one looks at Fountain's first book, the 2006 short-story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Now published in the UK for the first time, Che Guevara, like Billy Lynn, is the work of a very talented writer who is keenly engaged with analysing American identity in the wider world. Fountain has understandably been compared to other writers who use foreign settings as more than just fragrant backgrounds, such as Tom Bissell, Robert Stone and Graham Greene, whose "quiet American", Alden Pyle, stalks these pages in various guises. | Novels about the Iraq war remain scarce, but within this small literary subset Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, published last year, is the current ranking officer. It seems less surprising that a Dallas house-husband with no military experience should choose Iraq as his subject when one looks at Fountain's first book, the 2006 short-story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Now published in the UK for the first time, Che Guevara, like Billy Lynn, is the work of a very talented writer who is keenly engaged with analysing American identity in the wider world. Fountain has understandably been compared to other writers who use foreign settings as more than just fragrant backgrounds, such as Tom Bissell, Robert Stone and Graham Greene, whose "quiet American", Alden Pyle, stalks these pages in various guises. |
| Four of the eight stories take place in, or concern, Haiti, a country Fountain sees as "a laboratory, almost. Everything that's gone on in the last five hundred years – colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters – it's all there in very concentrated form." Places where everything is wrong are just right for Fountain. In the opening story, "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera", an American ornithologist is taken hostage by Farc‑like rebels in the Colombian highlands. They find it hilarious that a birdwatcher would visit Colombia's most dangerous region looking for parrots; "thirty years of low-intensity warfare", writes Fountain, "had given the rebels a heightened sense of the absurd". The absurdity increases when the chairman of the New York stock exchange arrives, Fountain only lightly fictionalising NYSE chairman Richard Grasso's bafflingly amiable 1999 meeting with supposedly anti-capitalist Farc rebels. | Four of the eight stories take place in, or concern, Haiti, a country Fountain sees as "a laboratory, almost. Everything that's gone on in the last five hundred years – colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters – it's all there in very concentrated form." Places where everything is wrong are just right for Fountain. In the opening story, "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera", an American ornithologist is taken hostage by Farc‑like rebels in the Colombian highlands. They find it hilarious that a birdwatcher would visit Colombia's most dangerous region looking for parrots; "thirty years of low-intensity warfare", writes Fountain, "had given the rebels a heightened sense of the absurd". The absurdity increases when the chairman of the New York stock exchange arrives, Fountain only lightly fictionalising NYSE chairman Richard Grasso's bafflingly amiable 1999 meeting with supposedly anti-capitalist Farc rebels. |
| Beyond the pleasures of Fountain's vivid image-making and fluent storytelling, his collection's great accomplishment is the depth of reality it gives the foreign settings. In "Rêve Haitien", Mason, an idealistic, if patronising, aid worker, becomes involved in a scheme to arm a rebel group by selling Haitian art treasures to a French dealer. But the story ends with him arriving at the burned-out house of his colleague, "the truth washing through him like sickness" when he realises how far he had been from the real action. Similarly, the title story describes a writer visiting Haiti who meets an old man, Laurent, who claims he fought with Che. The writer is seduced by the golden age of socialist revolution, but finds himself literally barred from it, standing outside Laurent's door on a street of old houses with "the slumped, encrusted look of shipwrecks lying at the bottom of the sea". He and his friend knock "until we made fools of ourselves, but no one ever answered within". | Beyond the pleasures of Fountain's vivid image-making and fluent storytelling, his collection's great accomplishment is the depth of reality it gives the foreign settings. In "Rêve Haitien", Mason, an idealistic, if patronising, aid worker, becomes involved in a scheme to arm a rebel group by selling Haitian art treasures to a French dealer. But the story ends with him arriving at the burned-out house of his colleague, "the truth washing through him like sickness" when he realises how far he had been from the real action. Similarly, the title story describes a writer visiting Haiti who meets an old man, Laurent, who claims he fought with Che. The writer is seduced by the golden age of socialist revolution, but finds himself literally barred from it, standing outside Laurent's door on a street of old houses with "the slumped, encrusted look of shipwrecks lying at the bottom of the sea". He and his friend knock "until we made fools of ourselves, but no one ever answered within". |
| These tightly plotted stories mostly run to 30 pages, which allows for substantial character development alongside well-handled narrative twists and turns. Even at this length, however, "The Lion's Mouth" covers an impressive amount of moral ground as it outlines the complex riddle of aid work in shattered nations. Failing to secure another round of funding for her workers' co-op in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Jill decides to get the money by smuggling blood diamonds in a food convoy. Fountain not only portrays the blend of cynicism, idealism, kindness and sanctimony that developing-world aid comprises, but does it in a story that builds up overwhelming tension. | These tightly plotted stories mostly run to 30 pages, which allows for substantial character development alongside well-handled narrative twists and turns. Even at this length, however, "The Lion's Mouth" covers an impressive amount of moral ground as it outlines the complex riddle of aid work in shattered nations. Failing to secure another round of funding for her workers' co-op in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Jill decides to get the money by smuggling blood diamonds in a food convoy. Fountain not only portrays the blend of cynicism, idealism, kindness and sanctimony that developing-world aid comprises, but does it in a story that builds up overwhelming tension. |
| In Fountain's work, occupation and morality are tightly bound. His first-ever story was about a stockbroker's immoral use of insider information. In "Asian Tiger", Sonny, a rapidly declining golf pro lured to work for the Burmese military junta, becomes the pawn of crooked businessmen and government officials. Sonny trades whatever moral capital he had for reasons all the more tempting for their mundanity: college for his daughters; alimony for his ex-wife. For Sonny, Burma proves a slippery, duplicitous place, but it is also, Fountain takes pains to point out, a real place inhabited by real people, not just a freakshow lying beyond the homeland's borders. "Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up," thinks Billy Lynn in Fountain's novel; these stories catch them at assorted crisis points in that painful process. | In Fountain's work, occupation and morality are tightly bound. His first-ever story was about a stockbroker's immoral use of insider information. In "Asian Tiger", Sonny, a rapidly declining golf pro lured to work for the Burmese military junta, becomes the pawn of crooked businessmen and government officials. Sonny trades whatever moral capital he had for reasons all the more tempting for their mundanity: college for his daughters; alimony for his ex-wife. For Sonny, Burma proves a slippery, duplicitous place, but it is also, Fountain takes pains to point out, a real place inhabited by real people, not just a freakshow lying beyond the homeland's borders. "Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up," thinks Billy Lynn in Fountain's novel; these stories catch them at assorted crisis points in that painful process. |
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