Steven Heighton (1961–2022)

PEARL RULED @ 10%

The author died last month of cancer. He was sixty.

This story opens with consensual (or as consensual as heterosex ever can be) sex turning into a shooting and a melodramatic follow-up crime committed by crazed-by-hate Turkish Muslim men in divided Cyprus.

I quit caring fairly quickly. This kind of crime isn't immediately interesting to me because it's using violence against a woman as an excuse to cause trouble for a man. And to be extremely clear, the violence isn't the sex. Which, yes, it was icky but it wasn't coerced or compelled. The violence was some Muslim men taking umbrage that a white guy was going to have sex with a Turkish secular woman.

Great. What the world needs now. However it was going to end, the beginning was pretty crappy by my lights and I don't need this. So Vale Author Heighton, we will not meet again.… (mehr)

In the late fall of 2015 Steven Heighton impulsively left home and offered his services as an aid worker on the Greek island of Lesvos. This was during the worst moments of a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions, when hundreds of thousands of desperate people were fleeing the Syrian Civil War. Lesvos, located a mere ten kilometers from Turkey’s western coast, is a natural landing point for refugees being smuggled into Europe. Then, as now, traffickers were taking full advantage of that proximity. In Reaching Mithymna, Heighton’s memoir of a month spent among the volunteers and refugees, he arrives with little notion of what he will be doing and who he’ll be doing it with. It is not an easy transition, from naïve Canadian writer insulated from much of the world’s turmoil to front-line aid worker rolling up his sleeves and trying to convince himself he’s ready for anything that comes his way. But Heighton jumps headlong into the fray, making plenty of mistakes but learning as he goes, about himself as much as the situation unfolding before his eyes. The book is a clear-eyed chronicle that places its focus squarely on the people the author encounters: exhausted volunteers approaching burnout, anxious and despairing refugees—families, men and women of all ages—who have left behind the ruins of their lives and risked everything for an uncertain future. Heighton’s narrative takes an even-handed approach. He makes no arguments or moral judgments in these pages. He does not try to convince us of anything. He lets the facts speak for themselves, and some of those facts are more than simply harrowing. In many respects the book is concerned with belonging—Heighton’s own mother was Greek and he is haunted by the remnants of a heritage that he has neglected. The flow of refugees on their way to other places is ceaseless, and he can’t help but wonder what will become of them and how they will be received when they reach their various destinations. In the end, as he approaches his return to Canada, the author is frazzled by his experience and more than a little disillusioned by yet another example of human willingness to inflict horrific suffering on other humans. He finishes by telling us, “Nobody ever changes until they have to.” Hopefully the change, when it comes, will empower those who care to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.… (mehr)

I wish I had read this earlier. Gripping story of a mountain climb gone wrong set on the border of China and Nepal. A group of strangers are drawn together when they see refugees being chased by Chinese soldiers and the decision is made to intercede. What follows is a beautiful, brutal, honest story of the true measure of these people as they struggle to survive and escape; set against the egotistical character of Wade, the climber determined to scale Kyatruk at any cost.
The author's writing is gorgeous and rich, his characters flawed, interesting and so well developed that they come alive.
I didn't want to put this book down and can't wait to read his other books.… (mehr)