Books |
Abide With Me
Sabin Willett
By
Published: Apr 30, 2013
Category:
Fiction
Guest Butler Laura Harrington is an award-winning playwright, lyricist and librettist, and the author of Alice Bliss, a novel I love a lot. Her plays, musicals and operas have been produced in the US, Canada and Europe, from Off-Broadway to Houston Grand Opera. She has twice won the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in playwriting and the Clauder Competition for best new play in New England. “Alice Bliss,” her first novel, won the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction. She teaches playwriting at MIT, where she was awarded the Levitan Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
I have often indulged in the typical writer’s fantasy that maybe I should just give up all this scribbling and do something useful. Become a doctor, or a social worker, or a High School teacher. And then I met Sabin Willett, a partner in a multinational Boston law firm who devotes considerable time to extraordinary pro bono work.
In his own words:
Early in 2005, I became more and more concerned with the claim by the Bush administration that there could be such a thing as a “war on terror” (wars are against proper nouns, like countries, not common ones), and that the president could imprison people on an island, without charge, without judicial review, and even torture them. So I led a group from my firm that took on “habeas corpus” cases for prisoners at Guantanamo.
Between 2005 and 2009, I often went to the base. Our clients were in a unique pickle. They were (and are) “Uighurs” — ethnically Chinese Muslims who had fled repression in their home country (in the far west of China), washing up in pre-war Afghanistan, which in those days was a place where Muslims would be protected from deportation back to their home country. When we invaded, they fled again, this time to Pakistan, where they were sold for bounties to US forces. No one knew quite what to do with them; to return them to China would be to subject them to torture for being dissidents. So they were sent to Guantanamo. They were never terrorists, or enemies.
Our case raised important constitutional issues about the president’s war powers and the powers of courts to give a real remedy. The ultimate judicial answers to the latter were not particularly good ones, but we did manage to get all but three of our clients released. Our clients today are in Sweden, Albania (dreadful place), Bermuda, Switzerland, and Palau (tiny Pacific island). I was with four of them when we flew to Bermuda — that was a few days I will never forget.
But that’s not all. During Willett’s thirty-minute commuter train ride to and from work he writes. Novels. His fourth novel is just out.
“Abide with Me” marries two powerful narrative strands: “The Odyssey,” with its story of a soldier returning home from war, and “Wuthering Heights,” with its exploration of class, status, lost love and obsession. The sleepy, gossipy town of Hoosick Bridge, Vermont had hoped to forget Roy Murphy, but Roy comes home to face his violent, complicated reputation as the bad boy from the “Park,” and to reclaim Emma Herrick, descendant of the town’s first family. Emma and Roy’s intense and unlikely adolescent romance provided scandalous gossip for the town, and Emma remained Roy’s obsession long after they parted ways. Now Roy returns from Afghanistan a changed man who will stop at nothing to obtain a piece of the Herrick’s legacy.
If that sounds too much like "chick lit," keep reading — “Abide With Me” is equally a story of wartime camaraderie, class differences, family discord, money and power. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Writing about his protagonist, Willett has said:
"Roy Murphy was ‘born’ at Guantanamo Bay, where I went for so many years as a lawyer. At night I would look up at Cuba’s astonishing bowl of night, thinking about some poor civilian in solitary, or some young soldier who’d just boasted to me of his imminent deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m less sure about Emma — but maybe she, too, took shape on that surreal military base, in whose camps I saw the failure of hatred as a policy and wondered, in idle moments, whether love might have been a more potent weapon.
Why is “Abide With Me” important now? Because it will give you a window into soldiers’ experiences in Afghanistan and at home, all while seducing you with a darkly compelling and unsettling romance.
Willett’s writing about Afghanistan is gutsy and occasionally lyrical. Roy Murphy’s commanding officer, Captain Dickinson, exercises his democratic right to criticize his government and blows holes in American policies in Afghanistan. It is remarkable to see this soldier/ intellectual carrying out his duty, absolutely clear-eyed, while criticizing the action he is involved in.
Willett crafts a portrait of a hero caught in a morally complex and often impossible world, while still trying to serve his country and carry out his mission. Captain Dickinson quotes Homer and frequently reminds his men that, when it comes to their mission in Afghanistan, they are doomed to repeat the history they do not know. Dickinson (surely no accident that our poetry loving soldier is named after Emily Dickinson) teaches Roy how to “practice” reading. When Roy returns home to Vermont, he works his way through 100 lines of “The Odyssey” every day to honor his Captain.
One of Willett’s strokes of genius is that Roy Murphy, whether on the battlefield or at home, is never insulated from his moral choices. More than once he pays the price for someone else’s misdeed, but he understands that the justice system will condemn the boy from the wrong side of the tracks with or without evidence. On the other hand, Emma, her mother and her sisters — characters from the Heights — are insulated both from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and from their father’s failed Ponzi scheme.
Let me leave you with a single paragraph that says more about America’s morass than many newspapers manage in months of coverage:
The captain was three paces away, walking toward Roy Murphy with his elbow coming up to show respect. But now he was a jumble of limbs tumbling, and on account of a second shot from Elmer, who couldn’t point the sumbitch and never hit nothing yet. The poet of life and death said he was the same as us but it was not true, he was not the same, he was better than us and we revered him and loved him and would have died for him. His last act on earth was to begin to salute Roy Murphy from the Park, Roy Murphy, who was at the prom but as everyone knew did not graduate high school, who did six months in Juvie, who could barely read until the captain taught him how to practice, Roy Murphy who was not and never would be good enough for her or for them or those people or for that house but was good enough to be sent seven thousand miles away, where the geniuses who understand how it all works, who wrote all the books and read all the books planted the flag in the mountains of Afghanistan.
An unforgettable character. An unforgettable book.
