 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
By Gil Courtemanche
Text $29.95
 The benign title of French-Canadian Gil Courtemanche's debut novel masks the chilling nature of its subject, the 1994 genocide in the central African nation of Rwanda when members of the Hutu ethnic group shot, bludgeoned or hacked to death half a million Tutsis, then 15 per cent of the population.
The pool is in the garden of the Mille-Collines hotel, a watering hole for the usual suspects attracted to crises: journalists and aid workers, military and mercenaries, a retinue of hustlers and prostitutes.
Amongst them is the central character, Bernard Valcourt, a recently widowed Canadian filmmaker in his forties who came on a project to help establish a local television station. After support funds and local enthusiasm ran short, the project went into terminal decline but he decided to stay on, awaiting a ringside seat at one of history's unfolding lowlights.
'Every day for the past two years there has been endless talk around the pool about the change that is brewing; it's going to come tomorrow or Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest, they say. But this time it's true and the regulars are caught up in a great ripple of excited whispering.'
With a backdrop of general impoverishment and the AIDS crisis, social tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis mount, fuelled by government broadcasts denouncing the latter for their behaviour, customs, even appearance - the taller and lighter Tutsis were viewed as foreigners by the ruling Hutus.
Valcourt becomes a participant after meeting the elegant Gentille, a hotel waitress 20 years his junior and, as will be her undoing, a Hutu (from her father's side) in a Tutsi-looking body.
Cautiously, they become involved - 'You're the only White who's never asked me...to... you know what I mean. You can stay here tonight if you want. I'd like it' - and have fallen deeply in love and lust when Rwanda erupts into civil war.
Enraged by the UN peacekeepers' refusal to intervene, Valcourt struggles to preserve his relationship and keep his wife alive, ultimately being sidelined by a wave of government-sanctioned killings on a scale unmatched in Africa.
'Neighbours, friends, sometimes relatives had come and had killed. Amid confusion perhaps, but efficiently. The killers were known, they were named. Every dead body had a known killer.'
By putting a human face to this holocaust, Courtemanche has done justice to the victims and made a complex situation more comprehensible, if hardly understandable.
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