Photo by Melanie Gillis Photography
Brent van Staalduinen is the author of the new novel The Peace Thieves. His other books include Do Not Count the Days. He is also an educator, and he's based in Hamilton, Ontario.
Q: In The Peace Thieves’ author’s note, you describe the novel as “my imperfect attempt to capture the spirit of Canada's troubled peacekeeping legacy.” Can you say more about that?
A: There are simply so many peacekeeping stories, one novel couldn’t possibly do justice to the full spirit. I call it a composite or hybrid tale, where I use my fiction writer’s license to pick and choose to serve my story, and as a result it has to be incomplete and therefore imperfect.
Paradoxically, that it can’t possibly tell every story and will fall short is also what makes it good fiction—being drawn into the myopic world of single characters is where novels and short stories sing the loudest.
This also extends to the reality of peacekeeping itself, too, which at its best shows how people can protect and care for the vulnerable, and at its worst can abandon and harm the very people it is meant to protect, as happened in Croatia, Rwanda, and Somalia.
Before I resigned from the armed forces, I applied to deploy, and many of my friends were actually sent overseas, and they experienced the immeasurable highs and lows of the missions themselves and through the years following.
They’re all incredibly grateful and proud of their service, from the most noble to the most difficult, and each will carry these multitudes for the rest of their lives.
Q: How did you create your characters Francis and Viva, and how would you describe their relationship?
A: Francis is an imagined version of someone like me, a reservist sent into an incredibly difficult and tragic environment, combined with real stories of how hard it was for many reservists to regain their bearings after they returned home.
Like me, he’s a man of conflicted faith and family history, but who still believes in helping others and making his small world a better place.
Viva was a bolt of lightning flashed into Francis’ middle age to utterly upend his safe but troubled existence, and force him to confront a past he thinks he can ignore. She is strong and bold, a whirlwind.
They’re strangers connected by blood, drawn into an unexpected, hesitant relationship and, ultimately, a new breed of family.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The entire novel asks the reader to imagine trying to keep peace where there is no peace to keep, and in my explorations to find an appropriate epigraph (a tradition I employ in all my books), I encountered the stunning work of Bosnian poet Selma Asotić, and in particular her poem “My father’s skin looks like the surface of the moon.”
These lines leapt out:
They told you shrapnel made men
celestial, that’s why you joined
the army. In midsummer, when weathervanes
carousel, you pull your silence
taut over our house. Nothing bad
will happen to us now, not with you
standing sentinel at the edge
of our sleep, guarding
against the peacethieves.
I was absolutely shattered by the trauma and sadness, the distance of war-damaged men, and those final lines…wow. I was knocked back a few feet. When I pondered who can, does, and might steal peace, I knew I needed to live in this space for a long while.
I approached Selma to see if I could use a few lines for the epigraph and she agreed because The Peace Thieves is at its heart an anti-war novel. She also granted permission to title my novel with words from the poem. I am incredibly grateful.
This poem and a few of her others can be found here: https://www.fusionmagazine.org/poems-by-selma-asotic/
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I knew that I would build the two narratives to merge at the battle fought between Canadian peacekeepers and the Croatian army, and the heinous ethnic cleansing committed against Serb civilians by the Croatians in the Medak pocket.
But I did leave the ending beyond that unknown until I arrived, not knowing how Francis and Viva would process things until after they’d gone through their individual and shared challenges and victories.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a historical novel called Child, the origin story of a notorious member of the Dutch resistance during WWII who is reluctantly drawn into the darkest and most violent corners of the underground conflict, and who is haunted by his abusive upbringing in a boarding school for troubled boys.
After the war, he’ll be drawn back into the darkness, using the deadly skills he gained in the Netherlands fighting the Nazis against war criminals permitted to settle in Canada without due process or consequence.
(Which actually happened: in the 1960s, frightened and distracted by the rising threat of communism, the Canadian government decided to quietly allow former Nazis and collaborators to enter and gain residency.)
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m pretty excited about this book, which is, as far as I’m aware, the only fictional account of Canadian peacekeepers—imagining my work filling a hole in the Canadian literary landscape is very cool indeed.
Also, even though I was a medic, I was a very good shot as well, gaining a gold level marksman badge with my C7 rifle, which I named Zoriana, or Zoe for short. (I know, I know… young and dumb and cliché all at once. Very cringe, as my daughter says.)
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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