Reviews

"Neurologist Durcan (A Short Journey by Car) dissects the ethics involved when politics, medicine and violence collide in this finely wrought novel about a neurologist turned biotech entrepreneur who travels to The Hague to witness his mentor's war crimes trial. Patrick Lazerenko is a punk teen in Montreal when he first meets Hernan García, the Spanish immigrant owner of a neighborhood grocery store. Caught trying to vandalize Hernan's store, Patrick is roped into working off the damages and soon finds himself attached to the García family. When Patrick sees Hernan's backroom medical consultations with local immigrants, he is inspired to become a doctor himself. Years later, a journalist exposes Hernan—dubbed the Angel of Lepaterique—as having been mixed up in the CIA-backed torture of subversive citizens in Honduras in the 1980s. Parallels to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are acute (and even overtly identified) as Hernan is accused of witnessing and aiding in detainee torture. Subplots involving a devious political think-tank, the long-expired romance between Patrick and Hernan's daughter and the goings-on at Patrick's company, provide a rich backdrop to the trial, but the centerpiece is the mélange of complex feelings that arise within Patrick, who finds himself simultaneously condemning and rooting for Hernan." 

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6469271.html)

"Durcan’s language is sculpted with seemingly effortless precision. His sentences are rich with detail and metaphor, luxurious with reference and allusion, but also lean and raw, getting straight to the point of what he wants to describe. And what he wants to describe is no simple matter: it is the struggle among conflicting feelings, impressions, beliefs and realities when good people try to understand one another despite the pain they have inadvertently inflicted on each other and on themselves. Durcan gets it. He gets the humiliation of losing one’s will in the face of rejection, the anxiety that erodes understanding, the hope that keeps us straining for self-knowledge. He gets it and he tells it beautifully, powerfully, both softly and savagely, in language that courses with intelligence."  

- LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA (lrc.reviewcanada.ca/index.php?page=motives-unknown)
 
"Once I cracked open García's Heart I couldn't put it down… Durcan's debut novel was both captivating and eloquent." 

- HOUR.CA (www.hour.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=12079)
 
"Durcan is a master at identifying and explicating the grey areas of life -- the part where most life takes place. [It] is impossible not to be drawn into the consideration of morality, on both an individual and societal scale. Long after the last page is read, Garcia's Heart will be firmly lodged in both the heart and mind."  

- TIMES COLONIST
 
"Durcan doesn't offer any easy answers in this searching, meticulously observed novel of moral complexity. He does offer plenty to think about."  

- THE TORONTO STAR (www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/208462)
 
"Durcan takes us right into the nub of the neuroscientific conception of the self. How tenable, after all, are our ideas of free will and individual responsibility, when genes for risk aversion and alcoholism and almost every element of what we understand as personality have been identified? And as interesting a debate as this might be in Scientific American essays, Durcan's skill as a novelist takes us deeper yet, into the entirely unabstracted essence of the problem … Montrealer Durcan's first book of short stories, A Short Journey By Car (2004), presaged this slippery, engrossing effort, and was a Globe 100 Book. His writing has only solidified since then; this becomes apparent as Durcan follows the history of Lazarenko's lingering love for García's daughter, a story that emerges unsentimentally and yet with a deep, aching sadness. … [A] sense of rupture and dislocation and of new possibility at the end of García's Heart becomes Durcan's principal and most compelling point: The novelist trumps the neurologist, and what matters is what stirs us, and the fact of that stirring. Dystopian novels must end with some kind of shattering, and here it is Lazarenko's self-anesthesia, and the reader's. You must read this book." 

- THE GLOBE AND MAIL (www.theglobeandmail.com)

"A stunningly well-written first novel…  Durcan avoids the common failing of novelists who want to impress readers with their research. Scientific knowledge enriches Garcia's Heart, but doesn't overwhelm it. Better still, he writes the way one imagines a brain surgeon employs his tools -- with strength to cut through bone and feather-light delicacy to excise minute strands of tissue. Durcan's style is a mixture of precision and playfulness, irony and moral seriousness reminiscent of British master Ian McEwan, or even a slightly restrained Martin Amis. Characters are delineated so cleverly that even minor figures spring to life. Settings, too, are painted wonderfully. … Literary delights are frequent, but they never detract from the novel's intensity or its moral purpose. Durcan shows that a writer need not be dull to be serious. It's a remarkable accomplishment…" 

- THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS 

"It's the complexities of García's character that drive the book, that pose the most difficult moral dilemmas … [Durcan is] one of the most disciplined authors to surface in Canada."

- THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

"García's Heart, Liam Durcan's contemplative debut novel, is about whether the true spirit of a man is the product of who he tries to be or of what his actions seem to prove he is. … The ethical dilemma at the core of García's Heart couldn't be timelier, in this age when the efficacy and morality of torturing prisoners is seriously debated. [The book] is thought-provoking and memorable. The concerns that consume its characters touch on matters that are bigger than any ordinary individual can rightly expect to assimilate and Durcan makes the characters all the more real for showing them to be overmatched, overwhelmed, and, ultimately, disappointed." 

- THE MONTREAL GAZETTE
 
"A remarkable debut novel … [with] evocations of Ian McEwan's Saturday … [but] Durcan beats McEwan at his own game by resisting the tendency to show off and, in doing so, produces a restrained, artfully paced work built around its central ethical question, which is not so much "what is evil?" as "what, exactly, is the nature of good?"

- QUILL & QUIRE, starred review (www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=5392)