A Song from Faraway

May 25, 2020
Béchard (White) continues his interest in the relationship between myths and fiction writing in this complex, captivating tale. In the late 1990s, Andrew Estrada reconnects with his half-brother, Hugh, after their father’s funeral in Vancouver, where Andrew, a guarded, pretentious literature student, was raised. Their father, Joe, was a draft dodger and songwriter-turned-novelist, whose first book, A Song from Faraway, was “about a composer of protest songs who lost his audience.” In the months and years after the funeral, Andrew feels jealous and unnerved by the free-spirited Hugh, three years younger, who grew up in Virginia and whom Joe said took after him, and who learns Spanish in order to read a book found in Joe’s belongings by a Mexican author named Rafael Estrada. As Andrew and Hugh wonder about the coincidence of the shared last name, Béchard leaves them for the Columbia University campus in 2008, where Francis Sheriden, a student, befriends a young Kurd named Amir, who invites him to Iraq to help broker the sale of his family’s art collection. Francis accepts, hoping to learn about the past of his taciturn father, William, a former CIA operative who helped stoke the Iran-Iraq War. While the author’s decision to leave the stories of Andrew and Francis hanging is initially jarring, he gradually fills in the murky details of their fathers’ lives through interconnected stories of their ancestors in Canada and the U.S., and ends with a powerful twist. Béchard provides rich insight into his characters’ search for meaning through art.