At a basic level, this is a story about Vietnam. From that perspective, the descriptions of Vietnam are beautiful. The writing is lyrical, almost poetic. There is watery haziness or dreamlike quality to the story, muting the sensory impact for the reader. Through Charles and his tortured soul, Bergen ambitiously tackles a hard subject: the psychological impact the Vietnam war has had on veterans and their families. While I found it easy to connect with Charles and understand his search for atonement - something that Vietnam in this story was unable to give him - the other characters came across as mere caricatures of personalities. I felt no emotion for Ada, Jon or the Douds. I found it odd how Ada comes to meet the people her father had encountered in Vietnam before going missing... that is all just way too convenient for any plausibility. While the purpose of Ada and Jon’s trip to Vietnam is to search for their missing father, they seem to drift aimlessly through the days and weeks, more tourists absorbing the local atmosphere than active searchers for their missing father. Ada in particular is an odd character, who seems to be, unknowingly to her, engaging in her own personal search for a broader connection and meaning. As one reviewer has stated, “ Both (Charles and Ada) are wandering, helpless and aimless, through a quagmire of painful feelings, anxiously groping toward a resolution that so often seems impossible.”

As mentioned above, the writing is exquisite and I do tend to like introspective novels. Even though Bergen has done an excellent job to try and explain the legacy of Vietnam, his characters and the random situations that absorb their time in Vietam leads me to believe that he and I just do not seem to be on the same page when it comes to what works to engage a reader like me. ( )

The Time In Between is, essentially, a quest, a search for something, nobody knows what, and arriving to a conclusion that there was nothing to find in the first place.

Plot-wise, there were no mysteries, buried secrets and life-changing decisions, except, of course, for a death here and there.

The story really is a "time in between" for Ada, Charles' daughter, who must learn to deal with the fact that her father is gone, become ready to leave Vietnam and go home to Canada and just continue to live her life as if this journey never happened. It is emotionally hard, both for Ada, and the reader, to leave this strange place, where so much has happened, and so many wonderful people were met, and go back home, where nothing would be as it was before. This feeling is too close to home for every passionate traveler, since coming home is always a challenge, involving a variety of mixed feelings. ( )

Canadian novelist David Bergen's THE TIME IN BETWEEN is simply one of the most riveting, unputdownable books I have read in a long time. He writes in a starkly elegant style reminiscent of Hemingway. In fact, though there are few similarities, I kept remembering A FAREWELL TO ARMS as I marveled my way through Bergen's book. Probably because this is a book about war and the long-lasting and far-reaching effects that war wreaks on its survivors and their families.

Charles Boatman was eighteen when he went to war in Vietnam. One moment in that war changed him. A instinctive trigger-pull that left him a tortured, guilt-ridden man for the rest of his life.

"He shot a young boy. The boy was standing in the doorway of a hut and he shot him. That's what he did ... he saw right away that it was a young boy and not a soldier ... they chased the remaining villagers out into the fields and called in an air strike. And everything disappeared. The boy that he had shot. The old woman that someone else had shot. All of that disappeared. Only it didn't."

'Only it didn't.' Thirty years later, a ruined marriage behind him, his three children grown, Charles Boatman travels back to Vietnam to try to understand what happened, to try to find peace. He disappears. His older daughter, Ada, and his son, Jon, fly to Danang to look for their father. There are no happy endings here. In fact the Boatman family's story is filled with an ineffable sadness that permeates this elegant novel. And there is also an unmistakable eroticism laced throughout the narrative, in both storylines, that of Charles, and the one of his daughter Ada.

In telling the Boatmans' story, Bergen reveals a broken family in rural Canada, and also a modern post-war Vietnam that not many know, a country that has largely put the past behind them and concentrates on the now, on the ruthless mechanics of survival.

Ada Boatman is carrying a book with her, THE GREAT GATSBY, which I pondered, remembering that famous last line from the Fitzgerald novel:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Charles Boatman, pinned mercilessly to a moment in time when he took a boy's life, a moment he could never forgive himself for.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway - both obvious influences in the work of David Bergen. And there is one more book which obviously played an enormous part in this novel. Bergen disguises the book in his narrative, calling it "In a Dark Wood." But the real book is one written by a North Vietnamese veteran of the war, Bao Ninh's classic THE SORROW OF WAR. I think I must read this book eventually.

THE TIME IN BETWEEN is a book about war, what it does, what it continues to do, to its unlucky participants. When Boatman's son, Jon, wonders why their father never told them about what had happened to him in the war and calls him a coward, Ada is more understanding, saying, "He must have been tormented." And then she also adds that "a person's private horror wasn't something to throw out for group discussion." Indeed.

I know I haven't adequately described what a beautiful book David Bergen has written, but that is what it is. Sensitive storytelling. Elegant (there's that word again), beautiful writing. VERY highly recommended. ( )

you know, when you have a book on your "to-read" list for a long time, it's hard not to build the book up. and then, when it's just not as good as you want it to be, you get very disappointed. i'm very disappointed. sorry, david bergen. ( )

you know, when you have a book on your "to-read" list for a long time, it's hard not to build the book up. and then, when it's just not as good as you want it to be, you get very disappointed. i'm very disappointed. sorry, david bergen. ( )