Charlotte Mendel's ​A Hostage

Reviewed by Gwen Davies

(Inanna, 2023)

​In this busy era, many of us chase the fantasy of having time to ourselves; even nicer if we could have the food, books, and other things we desire, free from responsibilities, so we can—fill in the blank. The answer for Charlotte in A Hostage is so she can write. But what would you do if you got your wish?
 
Taking a short, solo trip to the Sinai from a family holiday in the Middle East, Charlotte savours the thought of a much-needed break from everyday demands—over one too many glasses of wine. The next day she wakes up feeling ill and disoriented … in a place that is not her hotel room. The locked door, the view of a military courtyard, and her negotiations with young guard Sami over everything from food to information—in a language she doesn’t speak—bring her to understand: she has been kidnapped.
 
Among Charlotte’s published books is A Hero, the story of a family living under a dictator during an Arab Spring uprising. She has outlined the dictator’s paranoid, perilous hold on power, and the novel ends with his death. From reading her book, her captor, the real-life dictator Kassem, believes Charlotte has foresight. He believes that he will be absolved of his violent actions if he can convince her of the soundness of his rationale, and he will thus evade his own death.
 
Kassem comes to visit.
 
He is intelligent, interesting, seductively attractive and, as the days melt by, Charlotte becomes increasingly alarmed by her own thoughts and desires in relation to him. Perhaps she is not who she thought she was.
 
To stave off the emotions that threaten her very sanity, she looks for a “reason” for her kidnapping. Her abduction is not a cruel, random event—not if she can use her bizarre situation to help bring democracy and peace to a beleaguered Middle Eastern nation. While he argues for his policies, she tries to instil in him elements of a humanity that will reduce his brutal suppression of those citizens who oppose his rule.
 
Charlotte relieves her isolation by engaging more deeply with “Voice,” a Jiminy Cricket that has always provoked her to investigate her deeper thoughts. When she discovers that Kassem read A Hero, and that he is upset by the violent, public death of the dictator at the end, Voice mocks her: How does he know about A Hero? Nobody except your friends and family have read that book.
 
Days, weeks pass. Voice ridicules Charlotte’s attempts to rationalize her imprisonment with the absurd notion that she can change anything: You think you’ll help him bring peace to his country? Hubris is so much worse in people who actually have power.
 
And on the other hand, captivity isn’t wholly bad. Charlotte is supplied with everything she wants (except, by now, to go home to her kids and husband): time, a great writing set-up, excellent food, dope. Can she use this opportunity to do what we all believe we most want to do: discover our own greatness? What would you do—really, not just in your fantasies?
 
Charlotte’s discoveries seem to have more to do with coming to terms with her lack of greatness. Her concept of herself is undermined as meetings with Kassem and events in her secluded life unfold and her captivity stretches on.  
 
This book is a little mischievous, a little fun, and a little serious.
 
In addition to launching a double-guessing game, the warped kindness of Charlotte’s captors also creates an unnatural gratitude that fuels her distorting desires. Anxiety springing from isolation and the constraints of captivity play with her mind and her impulses, wreaking havoc on her ability to act with propriety. Relieving her rising sexual needs seems to relieve nothing.
 
A Hostage invites—provokes—us to look more truthfully at the notions of who we think we are. What would we actually discover if we had unlimited time to focus on ourselves? We begin to doubt not only Charlotte’s mind, but possibly our own. In our own current-day dystopia, distrust swirls through the lives of all of us; falsehoods abound in social media as the world becomes ever more polarized. A Hostage invites us to direct one question inward: should we trust our own minds? When we are miserable and blame others, are our minds deceiving us? And if that last bastion of implicit trust is broken—the trust in our own minds—then does that ultimately mean that we can trust nothing?
 
The lines between what is real and what is imagined become ever more blurred in the second half of the book, when Charlotte returns home to her family and is faced with the debilitating lack of privacy that springs from fame. The hard truth is, she has been streamed live throughout her captivity and her rescue, around the world.
 
But is she really famous? The reader begins to understand that what they have been reading is the words of an unreliable narrator—at the same time as that narrator starts to question the reliability of her own perceptions. With this turn, Charlotte labels the “unreliable” parts of her mind—the parts that lead her astray—as “the looney” parts. Like the part of herself that exaggerates the negative side of people whenever she happens to be furious with them, for example. Who among us hasn’t experienced that? On cue as usual, Voice cuts through the complexity to ask … does this mean there’s three of us now?
           
Why do certain books remain with us long after we have closed the covers and inserted them back into our bookshelves? For me, it is often because they have managed to strike a universal chord of relevance in my mind. A Hostage challenges our ideas about who we are by exploring where our minds take us when we get what we believe we want, along with endless time to focus on ourselves. You might be surprised by its conclusions.

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Gwen Davies is an award-winning writer of fiction, essays, and guidebooks. She teaches writing in several formats in the community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and established and ran a writing retreat, the Community of Writers, at the Tatamagouche Centre, NS. Until she retired recently, Davies reviewed documents as a plain language editor in a variety of fields.