XPat Fiction

After four RJ Huddy novels it's time to start asking what is up with all the twos.

Let's take it chronologically: The Verse of the Sword—a sprawling, epic story—could be described as a story of a man who dies one life in the U.S. and is born again in North Africa. Harrison Bacon, the protagonist, begins the novel in a hospital recovering from a boating accident, but this is not the central rebirth in the plot. That comes later, when he takes a teaching job in Morocco and fakes a suicide in order to start a new life. Along the way, he associates closely with several twins—first there is Rebecca, the nurse in the hospital who develops as a serious lover; then there is Abdelkader, the Algerian who provides him with work in North Africa; after that comes Laurence, a French woman and kindred spirit who gives way to Latifa; the Algerian soulmate that Harrison marries. Along the way there is his brother Mark and the evil twin John DeSpain, who though serving as the defining opposite of Harrison becomes his double in a faked identity Harrison is forced to assume. All of these associations create the full portrait of Bacon. Which is the truest twin? It has to be Latifa, who serves up the final punchline of the book. Yes, it sprawls and travels the globe, but the story is really about twos—Harrison's various twins and Harrison's two lives.

Huddy followed up The Verse of the Sword with Learn Thai with Me. Of all his books, this is the one that has the structure of twos built into it most intricately. The story is of two men (what else?), one a black hunchback, the other a gay white man, who arrive in Saudi Arabia as English teachers in 1980, just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is starting and the flow of arms travels right through their new neighborhood, where the two men—Jack Robinson and Nigel Peterson—reside as roommates. That they are two "sons" by name is not happenstance. Here again this is a fraternal, twin-like relationship, and though they both have other relationships (in Nigel's case, many other relationships), it is the bond between the two that is central to the story. The great bit of whimsy in this book is the title, which also serves as the title of a book that Jack and Nigel write together, described in the story this way:

An even more daring departure, one that he felt sure would be referred to as “revolutionary” in book reviews, was this: Learn Thai With Me was to be a work of art. The reader would begin it merely to learn the language, and throughout the preliminary chapters, of course, would do little more than that. But with the accumulation of vocabulary and grammar, the language would become lost in the art. Dick and Jane would give way to real characters. The reader might be touched by certain passages. People might read far into the night and turn up late for work the next day with the excuse, “Sorry about this, guys. I studied Thai until three this morning.”

Which, in a way, is a description of the book you read when you read this novel. The joke continues in the real world: When you search "learn thai with me" the results show Huddy's book along with several volumes of Thai language instruction. The book Jack and Nigel write is another twin: the twin of the book you are reading as you read about the book they are writing.

Having established two as a fundamental element to his art, Huddy wrote No Senator's Son about not one, but two sons of a senator. The problem is that one them, groomed to follow his father's footsteps, dies in Vietnam, leaving the younger brother, Clark Hatling, to be the one who fulfills that promise. But guess what? He lives a double life that is ultimately part of his undoing. The plot moves along at a familiar Huddy pace (fast), but once again the pattern of twos helps drive things along.

And now comes Death to the Rescue, which for once does not focus on international intrigue in the story line (it is there, but not a prominently). Not a problem, though, since there is still plenty of room to create a plot that continues with the pattern of twos. This time, the novel is actually composed of twin tellings of the same story. The first telling ends one way, happily, and the second ends . . . well, happily, too, but with evil underpinnings that the first telling has ignored. If we need more to bolster the theory that pairs drive the Huddy narrative, there is the fact that part two of the novel incorporates a play, an actual staged representation, of the events of part one, starring some of the characters playing themselves and their townsmen. A surprising, postmodern twist to this small-town murder mystery.

All well and good. There is a pattern of twos throughout these Huddy novels. What, then, is the big deal about that? Why is that significant in any way whatsoever?

I'm tempted to say that that right there is enough. It makes the books more fun somehow when you take note of this phenomenon. It is its own reward! These are not just page-turners with well-developed, interesting characters , injected with humor both wry and ribald. These books have a discernible pattern to them, a structure that unites them, that holds them up, if you will.

But there has to be more to it than that, there really does. And it goes beyond what was mentioned before about the reflecting stories of Learn Thai with Me and Death to the Rescue, though it is worth mentioning that those quirky elements add depth to the stories. The book-within-the book on the one hand and the play-within-the-mystery on the other both resonate similarly. That is, they reinforce that external appearances are never enough; you also need the internal reality to get the complete picture. Also true with Harrison in The Verse of the Sword and Clark in No Senator's Son: the central characters become complete with the addition of others to bounce off of.

And this, at last, gets to the heart of the matter. It is easy to get drawn into these novels and forget about what is the core issue that makes them more than just good stories with plenty of twists and turns to keep your attention. I finally come down to the most obvious answer: These are love stories, and the pattern of twos is there because the love that is represented is not the ambiguous agape or some feel-good love of humanity. Love is about coupling, after all.

This may sound corny, but love is about close relations between two people sharing as much of their innermost beings as they can possibly share, and almost all the plot-driving scenes in these books center on interactions between two people. At the end of Death to the Rescue there are pairings and couplings and marriage plans enough to make Shakespeare blush. Intimate relationships are integral to all of these books, and that is the what-for with this pattern of twos. It comes down, partly, to a vocabulary term I never knew until I got to page 87 of The Verse of the Sword: "uxorious," meaning excessive love of one's wife. Huddy's books come to you this way, like a proposal of marriage asking you to partner with them and get up close and personal; to let the reader be defined by the written, and vice-versa; to be their better half to the end.

Will you accept?

I have some fascination with these Central Asian outposts of the Soviet Union. According to Wikipedia:

Early in its history, it was a popular stop on the Silk Road because it had a spring, hence its name [meaning, roughly, "stone spring"]. Founded as a fort called Tashauz in the early 19th century by the Russians, the name was changed to the Turkmen form Dashkhovuz in 1992 after independence, and to Daşoguz by order of President Niyazov in 1999; the modern city is a Soviet-designed city with many monuments and museums acting as a local administrative and cultural center and rail junction.

They aren't kidding about that "Soviet-designed" business:

Boarding school in Dashhowuz