Dogs at the PerimeterBy Madeleine ThienW. W. Norton & Company, 2017 Near the beginning of Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter, two Canadian neurologists receive a letter from a man with Alzheimer’s who wants to know about the course of his disease. The letter ends, “Is there one burst of electricity that stays constant all my life? I would like to know which part of the mind remains untouched, barricaded, if there is any part of me that lasts, that is incorruptible, the absolute centre of who I am.” What the letter writer doesn’t know is that he’s sent his query to two researchers with a larger than usual stake in the answer: Janie, a woman who survived the 1970s Cambodian genocide as a child; and Hiroji, a man whose older brother disappeared in Cambodia while working for the Red Cross.War books are common. Death, devastation, grief – a regular reader comes across them constantly. Books like Dogs at the Perimeter are laden with blurbs about how “powerful” and “brutal” they are, no matter how by-the-numbers they might be. But Thien’s elegant style and meticulous examination of trauma make her particularly suited to writing about political upheaval and violence. Her first novel, Certainty, is about the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, and her third novel, the Man Booker shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing, focuses on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Dogs at the Perimeter, her second book, was originally published in 2011, but is being published in the U.S. for the first time this October. It uses the Khmer Rouge genocide as its backdrop, but Thien keeps her focus narrow by tracing the threads of identities, ghosts, and regrets that bind her characters to their present and past selves.The book opens with a description of Hiroji’s disappearance. Janie, his research partner, knows that he’s vanished purposefully, and she begins sleeping in his empty apartment to separate herself from her husband and young son. She spends the majority of her days wandering the winter streets of Montreal, lost in a sea of “numb grief.” These early sections are ponderous and a bit labored, with Thien scattering crumbs about Janie’s past, but mostly leaving the reader adrift in her foggy, fragmented observations. Although she visits her husband and son often, she prefers the company of the absent Hiroji and her dead brother, Sopham. Leaving her apartment on an icy day, Janie notes, “My brother is here. Sopham and I take the quiet streets, we file past the silent houses….My brother walks ahead of me. He is small and thin and finds the cold difficult. Where are his shoes?” She never uses the word “ghost” to describe him, or questions her perceptions. Sopham is “gone,” and he’s also taking a walk with her.One of Thien's signature writing choices is to include stories within stories. A typical scene begins: “In fits and starts, Hiroji tells me what has happened. It is March, not quite a year ago, nighttime, and we are sitting in his apartment.” (In a nice touch, past and present tense often have no relation to past or present time.) Hiroji recounts seeing a stranger on the street and knowing, “instantly, that it was his brother. That it could not be his brother. And yet, that it was.” Over a meal, the man tells Hiroji the story of finding himself on the street:

The man described waking, suddenly, on the wet ground, his entire body convulsed with pain. Things were broken, blood was sticky on his fingers, but he couldn’t remember why, he didn’t know how this had happened. For hours, maybe days, he had walked in a dream, not comprehending how things moved in the world. Cars hurried down on him. There were too many voices speaking too many languages and he didn’t know which one belonged to him. His stomach hurt and his legs felt empty, but he didn’t know that this hollowness was hunger. He had no memories, no thoughts, no ideas, nothing. Everything had been taken away, that much he understood, but by whom and when did it happen?

Suddenly, Hiroji vaguely remembers that he knows this man from treating him at the hospital long ago, and that they called him Johnny Doe. But even after placing the man, he still thinks of him as both “Johnny” and “James” (his brother’s name). Later, Janie experiences a similar moment of confusion as she walks through the Montreal snow: “I see my father in the shape of another person, walking up ahead….I run up to the man who is not my father, grab his elbow, and spin him around to face me. A stranger swears and flings me away.”Scenes like these make it difficult for the reader to remember what is “real,” who is who, and who knows who how. And things only become more complicated as Thien takes us into Janie, James, and Hiroji’s pasts. These segments are the ones that truly shine. We learn that during the eight years of the Cambodian Civil War, Janie’s father admires the Khmer Rouge (the insurgent Communist group that eventually overthrows the established government). But when the war finally ends, the entire population of the capital city, Phnom Penh, is forced to evacuate, including Janie’s family. Millions of people are randomly relocated to rural areas and assigned agrarian jobs befitting citizens of the new Socialist state. Educated men like Janie’s father are rounded up and taken away, and ten-year-old Janie watches her mother starve as she works in the fields all day.In this new environment, Janie quickly learns that words mean nothing. Thien never puts too fine a point on the gap between speech and reality – she lets each situation speak for itself. When Janie’s family meets the head of their cooperative, Kosal, he smiles and tells them, “At oy té. You have nothing to fear.” When Janie’s mother clasps her hands while begging the soldiers not to take her husband, the armed soldiers refuse her by saying, “Don’t demean yourself. Everyone is equal now.” At a filthy, overcrowded infirmary near their cooperative, nurses give Janie’s mother medicine that looks like “small white cubes” in water. They quickly realize that the “medicine” is sugar. Life becomes a surreal trail of skeletal people who disappear, only to be replaced by others as if they had never existed:

In small groups, the older children were sent away. The driver and his wife, the machinist and two of his boys, became sick and died. The students, the teachers, the banker, they vanished. If a family asked for a missing person, Kosal answered them by saying, “I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know this person.”

To begin a new chapter in Cambodia’s history, Khmer rouge soldiers and community leaders instruct people to sever all ties to the past:

[Kosal] called us the new people, he said we must abandon our diseased selves, we had to cut loose our dreams, our impurities, our worldly attachments. To pray, to grieve the missing, to long for the old life, all these were forms of betrayal. Memory sickness, Kosal called it. An illness of the mind.

A young Hiroji witnesses the effects of the new regime when he travels to Thailand to post pictures of his missing brother. Cambodian refugees flood his camp, and he begins looking after a young boy named Nuong. But in a Macbeth-like revelation, Hiroji notices that Nuong doesn’t turn when he calls his name: “This was a country, he had learned, in which no one responded to their names. Names were empty syllables, signifying nothing, lost as easily as a suit of clothes, a brother or a sister, an entire world.” When words no longer reflect reality, names can be assumed or discarded at will. A boy from Janie’s camp gives her the name “Mei” one day, telling her, “If you want to be strong, you have to become someone else.” When Sopham becomes an interrogator in a torture prison, he renames himself “Rithy,” using the new identity to shield “Sopham” from his complicity and despair.One name stays consistent throughout these extensive flashbacks: Angkar. It means “the organization,” but those in power in the new Cambodia grant the term full humanity. When Janie’s mother gets sick, a nurse sends Janie away because “the doctor had sent word to Angkar” about too many relatives’ visits. In response, Janie thinks, “What more could Angkar do to us?” She also worries, “The things I had kept hidden from Angkar had not been buried deep enough.” Later, an interrogator warns a prisoner about his impossible situation: “If you act correctly, you are the enemy, if you act incorrectly, you are the enemy. These are Angkar’s own words.” Ironically, this regime that masters the art of erasure also obsesses over the idea of keeping records. The Khmer Rouge decrees:

Every person must write a biography. They must write it many times to ensure that all the details are correct….[We] are making an archive in which everything is accounted for, and once a file is there, it is eternal. This is Angkar’s memory. We are all writing our histories for Angkar.

James, Hiroji’s brother, gives many “biographies” while imprisoned after the Civil War, escalating the identity exchanges even further. Perhaps unintentionally, it is James who becomes the core of the novel. Before prison, he was already referred to by two names (the other being his childhood Japanese name, Ichiro). In prison, the situation becomes more complicated when one of the main interrogators mistakes James for a long-lost childhood friend named Kwan. The man asks James if he is, in fact, this lost friend, and James simply replies, “No.” But the interrogator calmly responds, “Can you be certain?” He doesn’t care about the truth – it simply comforts him to think that this figure from his past has reemerged. As he wastes away in prison, James finds his interrogator’s confidence seductive, steadily losing his grip on who he is. The confusion leads to moments like the following, in which James imagines talking to his little brother:

In the corner of the room, Hiroji, or was it Kwan or was it some metamorphosis of the two or was it James as he once was, the James that might have grown up in Tokyo with a father and a language of his own, with a box in his heart to hide his fear, shifted his weight and knelt on the ground so now they could see each other clearly, on the same level.

It’s a testament to Thien’s skill that the cornucopia of lifelike ghosts and name switches rarely becomes unmanageable. She adds layer upon layer of stories and personas to show how porous and overwhelmed the characters feel, but leaves enough space between narratives to avoid overwhelming the reader. It also helps that, although there are occasional moments of overwrought descriptions and heavy-handed musings, Thien mostly maintains a streamlined, understated style. She often lulls readers by beginning a paragraph or line traditionally, only to twist something at the last moment. As a child, Janie loves the story of Vesna Vulovic, a woman who survived a plane explosion and a thirty-three-thousand-feet fall to the ground. After a standard paragraph about how lucky her idol is, Janie concludes, “To me, [Vesna] was like a drop of rain or a very tiny bird, someone whom the gods had overlooked.” While in prison, James realizes that “[b]efore, in Canada, he never wondered how many deaths we can survive, how many deaths we can bear, how many deaths we deserve.” Those unexpected words – overlooked, deserve – are subtle jolts that make Dogs at the Perimeter feel fresher than its subject matter would suggest.The main problems with the novel are the natural consequences of Thien’s structural choices. Readers must wade through about a third of the book to reach the first prolonged, satisfying flashback, and Janie’s disjointed, hollow sense of self makes the extensive time spent with her feel unrewarding. Even after learning her backstory, Janie remains a shell of a character, defined by her trauma rather than any discernible personality. The last sections focus almost exclusively on James and Hiroji, and the sharpness of their characters and stories overtake the overarching narrative, making the reader question whether Janie’s muffled sections are necessary at all, except as another layer in Thien’s storytelling experiment.Despite that possibility, every character’s tale adds depth to the early question from the Alzheimer’s patient, the one who wanted to know “which part of the mind remains untouched, barricaded, if there is any part of me that lasts, that is incorruptible, the absolute centre of who I am.” As she reveals more and more about the past, Thien provides several possible answers. Significantly, the reader never learns Janie’s original Cambodian name, but we do learn that her Canadian foster mother, when naming her Janie, tells her, “Sometimes, we are granted a second chance, a third one. You don’t have to be ashamed of having lived many lives.” Later, Janie remembers that her first mother believed something similar: “We did not come [into the world] in solitude, my mother told me. Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives. From the first morning to the last, we try to carry them until the end.” Maybe having an “absolute centre” of ourselves would be more of a burden than a blessing.But at other points, Thien suggests that our love for others remains constant, no matter who we become. After Janie and Hiroji treat an artistic patient for a rare, degenerative brain condition, the patient informs them that she spends “long days at the riverside,” where “things move, ephemeral, and nothing stays the same.” She takes comfort from the idea. But in a key moment much later in the book, James regrets how he used to brush off the love of his Cambodian wife: “He had treated everything as if it were ephemeral, as if things could only be beautiful if they were passing, if they were mortal.” Whatever names they adopt, Janie, Hiroji, and James continue to be haunted by the same beloved figures, all following the directive from Janie’s mother: “Guard the ones you love….Carry us with you into the next life.” Maybe the memory of having loved a specific person is the only thing that preserves a specific soul.____Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer living in Russia.