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The Unintentional Healing of Soul

by Lindsay Boyd

244 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0067; ISBN 1-55395-704-0; US$21.00, C$24.00, EUR17.50, £12.50

Second edition

Novel about an individual's need for healing and the unexpected way this begins to arise set against a backdrop of war-scarred Guatemala

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about the book      about the author      press release      reviews      sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book Steve Casey, a forty-five-year-old divorcee with one son visits his ageing parents on the eve of his departure for Central America. He is about to commence his third trip to the region in the space of five years. All have been undertaken in the hope of finding out something about the fate of a younger brother, Kenny, who went to Central America years before only to lose contact with the family. After visiting Mexico City for several days, Steve travels to Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, where he begins to recall the course of his relationship with his ex-wife and much else about his earlier life. He goes on to make inquiries in regions that Kenny spent time in but encounters a series of dead ends, as in the past. He then takes his search to Honduras where he decides to help out a voluntary group in Tegücigalpa for nearly a month before moving on to El Salvador. In San Salvador, he meets an Australian aid worker who suggests that an expatriate living in the town of Suchitoto might have met Kenny. Steve calls on this man and learns that they were acquainted. The expatriate last had news of Kenny when the latter was about to enter Guatemala with the intention of taking some formal Spanish tuition. In the course of his wanderings, Steve recalls the time when his brother returned to Australia in February 1989, following a two-year spell in Central America. He remembers how he established himself in a bed-sit in Melbourne but being unable to find paid employment made do with voluntary work. Despite his efforts, however, Kenny quickly became disillusioned with the Australian way of life and within the space of approximately a year saved sufficient funds to make his way back to Central America. Steve travels to Guatemala. He visits several language schools in Antigua and Quetzaltenango but no one recalls Kenny. On the spur of the moment, he decides to enroll in classes at one of the schools in Quetzaltenango. During the course of a month's tuition, his fourth and last teacher at the school tells him about a community of internal refugees based in the Petén jungle. Several foreigners have helped the group in the past, he is informed. He calls at the Guatemala City office of the refugee group and decides that he will journey to the jungle. On the long trip, Steve avidly listens as Olga, a young member of the group, relates her story. As a result he makes some shattering discoveries. In addition, he is finally able to come to terms with the failure of his marriage and many of the other disappointments that have plagued his life to date.

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About the Author A native of Melbourne, Australia, the author is a community development worker and writer. He has written screenplays, plays, poetry, short stories, articles, novels and made films, some of which have been produced and / or published. Since 1987 he has travelled extensively, having visited more than forty countries for the purposes of work or travel. He has lived and worked in eighteen communities with marginalised groups including homeless people, disabled people and refugees and is currently based in a community in Jacksonville, Florida. The Unintentional Healing of Soul is his first published novel.

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Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NOVEL ABOUT AN INDIVIDUAL'S NEED FOR HEALING AND THE UNEXPECTED WAY THIS BEGINS TO ARISE SET AGAINST BACKDROP of WAR-SCARRED GUATEMALA.

A divorced Australian man travels to Central America in search of a younger brother who lived and worked in the region some years before. From Nicaragua he makes his way to Guatemala. It is little more than two years since the country made the transition to peace after a thirty-six-year-long civil war. Steve, the divorcee, begins a healing journey that is both spurred by and parallels that of the Guatemalan people.

Seven years after a final peace accord was signed, bringing to an end the country's civil war, Guatemala remains in a state of flux. On December 28 the people will elect a new president in a run-off poll. The former dictator, Efrain Rios-Montt, came a distant third in the first poll on November 9 and is no longer in the race. His term as leader of Guatemala's congress will end in January, thus removing his immunity from prosecution on charges of genocide during his tenure as military dictator in the early eighties.

Lindsay Boyd worked as an accompanier to a group of internally displaced refugees in Guatemala's Petén jungle in 1996 / 97 and draws on this experience in The Unintentional Healing of Soul.

If the healing process of a country after a long and vicious civil war is bound to be painful and drawn out, that of an individual can be equally onerous. In his novel, the author traces the journey of a man who is unconsciously propelled on his long overdue journey of healing by his experience of a country and a people making tentative progress in the same direction.

The Unintentional Healing of Soul by Lindsay Boyd; 244 pages; paperback; $16.38 US ($23.50 Can); published by Trafford Publishing / Changeling; ISBN: 1-55395-704-0. To read excerpts online, please go to: www.trafford.com/robots/03-0067.html For review copies or interviews, contact Mary Lucas at Trafford Publishing (1-888-232-4444; www.trafford.com) or e-mail the author: boysay@hotmail.com

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Praise for The Unintentional Healing of Soul

Richly hued novel of breadth and depth

In the early years of the new millennium the war rhetoric is different to that which prevailed through much of the twentieth century. Talk of wars to end all wars, first strikes and nuclear holocausts is rarely heard in this day and age. The bombast we are inundated with today is as much about wars on as it is wars against a particular foe as such. These wars, so we are led to believe, are unlike those that have preceded it. No one can say how long they will go on. Nor when, if ever, peace might be declared.

Whether you are prepared to accept the pronouncements or not, one fact cannot be denied: the world is in desperate need of healing. But if the stimulus for this does not arise first at home, within oneself, can the process ever be more than token? Isn't the vital first step the recognition of the need to heal? Paradoxically, the catalyst might lie in the experience of a culture far from one's home.

The Unintentional Healing of Soul introduces us to Steve, a divorced Australian man in his middle years. He is, by his own admission, a reluctant party to an impending trip to Central America. We sense that his unwillingness stems from a variety of reasons, not just the ones stated. In the past few years he has made two trips to the same region in a futile attempt to resolve the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a younger brother who lived and worked there previously.

Such a quest would in all likelihood be a tall order for anyone, even an individual content with himself and his place in the world. It will be harder still for a person nursing unresolved hurt. Steve is a picture of discontent. He has no great love for his job as a builder and restorer of houses in Brisbane. His relationships with his younger siblings are, at best, perfunctory.

He is estranged from his son, Tim, despite having won custody of him at the time of the breakdown of his marriage. But by far his most virulent demon is his bitterness over the failure of his marriage to Carolin, the woman he fell in love with, sought to help, went on to entrap and then gave up on when she could not live up to his expectations of an ideal mate.

It is with this and more haunting him that he leaves for Central America one more time. Thinking of his mother, he senses the impossibility of returning home empty-handed on this occasion. He will bring her some news of her missing son Kenny, an admittedly cold comfort for a woman who has lived in a perpetual state of mourning since the untimely death of her firstborn years before. Arriving in the region, Steve is all at sea, exactly as he was on his previous two trips, when at times he literally followed in the footsteps of Kenny in the hope that this might help him better understand what drove the younger man and how he might have felt on his quest.

There would not be a traveler in the world who has failed to realize that the habits of a lifetime remain in the baggage. They do not simply vanish in a new setting. Steve's rancor, his custom of falling back on his virility when all seems lost, and much else besides, are amplified in the vastly different Latin world. But that very difference provides a lifeline and the glimpses we have gained of the better side of the man are expanded and reveal him as more than what he has given himself credit for. As he sees himself more clearly, we see him more clearly.

Was this not Kenny's experience years before? Correspondence from the time, knowledge of the difficulties Kenny faced trying to readapt to life in Australia after his first spell living and working with Central America's poor, indicate that it was similar. Though Steve might be as far from his younger brother as he ever was in terms of physical distance when he follows up a vague lead and, like Kenny, undertakes Spanish language studies at a school in Guatemala prior to traveling around that country, we feel that he is edging closer to him psychically all the time.

This is a novel of rich hues and exemplary breadth and depth. In the compass of less than two hundred and fifty pages, the author treats themes as diverse as the difficulties an individual might face readapting to his native culture after a long period of immersion in something radically different, the value of voluntary work experience, the folklore of the Mayan people of Guatemala, points of similarity between indigenous spiritual thought and Eastern spirituality, the striking resilience of poor and oppressed people. Because they live among such people and savor the lesson of their unbreakable will to survive, an unexpected process in the journeys of both brothers is ignited. Steve sets off in search of his younger brother only to begin a journey of self-discovery. But the missing Kenny's presence is palpable throughout. In a telling image near the end, the two appear to merge; in finding himself, Steve also discovers the one for whom he traveled to the other side of the world. Not before time he can find forgiveness in his heart that he was incapable of finding before. He can begin to heal. This compelling novel is nothing less than an invitation to the reader to open up and, if need be, face hurts and sadness that might have been suppressed. The world will be a better place as a result. - Noah Kass from Escondido, California, January, 28, 2004

Once you start this book you won't put it down... Very interesting and enjoyable book. You feel as if you are a part of the self-discovery journey with the main character, Steve. It's one of those books that keep coming back to you after you read it. The author writes with such clarity, yet he's very thought provoking. I was not able to put the book down for long as I had to find out the end search for a family member in Central America, a truly shocking and revelating end. The book exposes and penetrates your human psyche at all levels while continuously entertaining you. I would highly recommend this book for someone who is looking for depth and substance in a book. I am looking forward to more books from this author. - Joanne Cooper from FL, USA, December 5, 2003

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Sample Excerpts

(Excerpt)

Part One Latin America

Chapter One

I must admit it's only with reluctance that I undertake last-minute preparations for my third trip to the region in the space of little more than five years, a trip that I will commence in the middle of the day tomorrow when I fly down to Sydney and which will proceed from there to Los Angeles, where I've an onward flight to Mexico a couple of hours later. I should reach Mexico City about mid-evening, all being well.

I plan a stopover of four days before continuing on to Managua in Nicaragua. This strikes me as being as good a disembarkation point in the region as any given the raison d'être of this voyage, one that I'd gladly postpone or cancel outright even at this late juncture.

Anyone would be circumspect faced with the prospect of a trip that essentially has no destination as such, irrespective of the details printed in red on the wafer-thin paper of my airline ticket. How long I will stay in the Nicaraguan capital, which direction I will take from there, I haven't yet decided.

I'll need to invent an itinerary as I go along. My initial two trips to Central America were largely improvised but on those occasions I had leads to go on and from time to time could put aside the nagging suspicion that at best I was clutching at straws. This time there is nothing new for me along those lines; for instance, no stray letter or card has suddenly come to light. So it's hard to reconcile the thought of the futility I will almost certainly feel when the Latin world is beneath the soles of my shoes again in a matter of a couple of days from now.

More than anything it is to placate my mother that I am once more in this position and I had her in mind when I agreed, with hardly a second thought, to make a third trip. My father, James, floated the idea about three months ago and I supposed, as I'd done in 1993 and again in 1996, that the onus fell on me owing to the fact that I was the oldest sibling.

I was with my sister, Denise, and my brother Rene and his family one oppressively sticky afternoon in the week leading up to Christmas. We had gathered at James and Gillian's and were talking about Kenny in a roundabout way when James came to the point. It crossed my mind for a split second that Rene might like to go in my stead this time. But I realised more or less in the same moment that such a trek is the last thing in the world he would've wanted to involve himself in.

Only two years have elapsed since my second spell in Latin America but to judge by the lassitude of my preparations this time I've learnt little from then or the experience before that. It was as though I reckoned I could take care of basics for the trip in a day or two. But this was not possible and consequently the past two weeks had been hectic.

Towards the end of February I was alarmed to discover I needed a new passport, there being only five months' validity remaining on my old one. I rushed straight to the passport office on Ann Street and was relieved to discover that renewing a nearly expired document wasn't a complicated process.

Little more than a week was needed. On the day in question I went to the office from work (I had a job on in Coorparoo at the time) just before closing hour. It was with conflicting emotions that I inspected the document at close quarters as I rode the four flights to the ground level.

I thought then how odd it was that I had requested a sixty-four page document. I was hardly the most frequent traveller in the world after all. So why had I gone to the expense of ordering something twice the regular size, as if I was considering exchanging my staid Brisbane-bound life for that of a wanderer? Nothing could've been further from the truth, or so I told myself.

Was it a subconscious acknowledgement of my feeling of despondency in the face of this trip, a concession to a fear, vaguely sensed within, that this journey would be different to the first two I'd made? Did it amount to an avowal that I had not the faintest notion what would ensue when I put my native shores behind me one more time?

After acquiring the new passport I sent it and a visa application form that I had never used to the Nicaraguan embassy. But days later they called me to say I had omitted to enclose the fee. As soon as I forwarded them x amount of dollars they would process my application. I did their bidding and received the visaed passport back in the post yesterday.

Someone, I forget whom, once wrote that a person is never more in possession of a journey than when he is preparing his departure. In that event the business of the trip itself must come as a letdown. I can empathise with such sentiments and indeed what I feel strongly at the moment, with so much preparation behind me and still to come -my bags are no more than half-packed- is in possession of my trip. Tomorrow, when I board the aircraft, things will be different. I don't doubt it.

It's six o'clock in the evening. Tim, my son, came back from university in the middle of the afternoon but went on his way again shortly afterwards. I am not sure where he was bound. Since he returned from Cambodia he's been even less communicative with me than formerly.

Around an hour ago, convinced that everything was in hand, I lay down to catch my breath. But when I sensed that I was skirting too close to sleep for comfort, I dragged my frame off the couch and into a straight backed chair. I had no wish to take a nap given that my day wasn't over by a long chalk.

For the past thirty minutes or so I've been sitting listening to the rain. Since it started to fall on a daily basis in the first week of last month the summer has been moderate. Inevitably, it helps take the edge off conditions that can otherwise be unrelenting at this time of the year.

The city's parks and gardens will look comparatively green this winter if it keeps up, in stark contrast to their appearance following drier than average summers. According to the calendar, summer has ended and we're now in autumn. But here in the sub-tropics there is little to differentiate the two. Children in these parts grow up associating the four seasons with the southern regions of the country and wonder what such a climate must be like.

Already, be it in Nicaragua or elsewhere, I can see myself in the coming weeks, picking up foreign newspapers to leaf through to the pages detailing the weather around the globe on the off chance that Brisbane might be there. As if the weather, or anything happening in my hometown, could be of importance from a distance of thousands of miles.

On my previous trips I'd done the self-same thing in an attempt to feel less removed from what was familiar and, by its very familiarity, unthreatening. But this fruitless endeavour had intensified my homesickness. I found myself dwelling on this again in the evening as I made way across town to Ferny Hills.

Prior to setting off I spent several minutes on the phone. Firstly, I called Denise though I had to be content with leaving a message on her answering machine. There was a chance she would call back though by no means was it guaranteed, knowing my sister. Rene, however, was at home and we yarned at some length about one thing or another.

Someone overhearing the conversation could've been forgiven for thinking the trip I was about to commence was a trifling affair, so passing a mention did it rate and this at the tail end of the call. I ought not have taken this as an affront for I knew as well as anyone Rene's thoughts on the subject of our younger brother. He had merely given me a better-you-than-me look when I had announced my decision at the pre-Christmas rendezvous.

Late in 1982, shortly after Denise moved into a place of her own, my parents sold their Camp Hill Queenslander and bought a small plot of land in Ferny Hills, on the other side of the city. I think they were happy to leave the house and suburb in which they'd raised five children for the quieter ambience of Ferny Hills. I helped with the planning and building of the new abode.

When I arrived on their doorstep that evening rain was still tumbling out of the sky. The air was alive with the aroma of freshly sprinkled flowers, grass and leaves. Beyond the locked screen door at the front of the house few lights were on. But I was able to make out the fuzzy glow emanating from a television set, the volume of which was not low enough to be indistinct.

I brought my face close to the tightly meshed wire of the screen and called out. Perhaps she was dozing but I had to repeat myself three or four times before I succeeded in rousing Gillian. Blinking her eyes, she advanced towards me out of the shadows and at once unlocked the door, explaining as she did that James had retired more than an hour ago.

I was uncertain of the exact ages of my parents. In their late seventies, is what I would've answered had anyone inquired. For me, they had been more or less the same age for years. The grimness in Gillian's expression had been there as long as I could recall. It had simply waxed and waned with the passing time. James' difficulty walking was also like a benchmark in my memory.

Sitting with my mother, I reiterated the point that I had made many times since the decisive family gathering of the previous December: that as soon as I had some news of Kenny I would let them know. Seeing the look on her face, I sensed the impossibility of returning home empty-handed on this occasion. If I did so again she'd never reconcile his loss in her mind. I was convinced that this was her sole aim in life now, having long ago given up hope of regaining him.

It was fitting that my mother was in one part of the house and my father in another. For many years they had spent more time apart than together, even while continuing to reside under the same roof. I'm hardly one to judge but once, not long ago, I suggested to my mother that she could try speaking to her husband. Cuttingly, she answered that it was impossible to talk to a post.

On uncertain legs, James manoeuvred his way into the room and joined us. My exchanges with him were confined to the practical side of things. There were countless precedents but I couldn't help feeling disappointed. On the whole, I was subdued before the ailing couple, the ones at whose behest I would be winging my way out of the country in a little more than twelve hours.

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Catalogue Information

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