Heighton, Steven. Every Lost Country. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Every Lost Country contains a parable that illustrates the classic “what would you do if . . .” dilemma as it relates to the pacifist's stance. In the story, a Bodhisatva (Buddhist 'enlightened being') finds himself in a boat with a number of sleeping innocents and a serial killer. Fearing harm to the innocents, he engages in debate with the killer hoping to dissuade him from doing what he has been known to do. The killer, however, insists that his nature demands that he do what he does, and takes out a knife. The question is: What does the Bodhisatva do? Does he say, “If you must kill, take me,” which would leave the innocents both helpless and vulnerable, or does he think of another action, given his moral aversion to harming another life?

            We are high in the Himalayas in Every Lost Country, where a party including a “Doctor Without Borders” veteran is preparing to launch an historic assault on Kyatruk, the second highest peak in the range after Everest. Kyatruk happens to be in Nepal but adjacent to the border with Chinese-occupied Tibet. In part because of the doctor's insistence on helping a group of Tibetan refugees being pursued by Chinese militia as they attempt to escape into Nepal and another of the party's members foolish attempt to film the event, half of the party ends up arrested and in a jail deep in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

            There follow parallel subplots, one of an obsessive adventurer seeking to be the first to conquer Kyatruk, the other involving the doctor, his daughter, the photojournalist and a group of Tibetan nationalists trying to make their way back to Nepal after a break from prison in China. Both are harrowing ordeals: the mountains swirling with storms, the thin atmosphere that debilitates the body and scrambles the mind, the likelihood of imminent death and—probably the most poignant—the desires of the self in opposition to the hunger for the other.

            It's a dense novel and a gripping tale as stories of people struggling on the knife edge of survival often are. What Heighton achieves that many don't, however, is the delicate balance between plot and character that prevents the story line from overwhelming inner dynamics. If anything, there are too many characters with too many conflicting impulses for one story, the doctor's struggle between his Hippocratic obligations and his personal need for both physical and emotional survival being only one. It's hard to do justice to a dozen characters in one 300-page novel. I found as I read that there were just too many Tibetan and Nepalese names for me to keep track of who was who without back-checking. Like foreign faces, foreign names tend to look more similar to each other than we're accustomed to when close to home.

            (I'm having a problem writing this paragraph) I've sometimes said that for a creation to qualify as art it must meet two requirements: it must appeal dramatically to the sensory region of the viewer's consciousness (who needs to experience touch-taste-smell-visual-auditory sensations almost as if it were a first-person experience) and it must change the viewer forever, hopefully for the better.  Every Lost Country passes this test for me; I found myself, for instance, pulling an afghan over my knees when I accompanied the climbers up into the death zone near the summit of Kyatruk. As to the second criterion, I have brushed shoulders with a man who must answer the “what would you do if . . .?” dilemma and made the decision I never hope I have to make.

            The Bodhisatva in the boat disarms the serial killer, stabs him with his own knife and throws him overboard.

            What would I do . . . if ?