The emotional and scientific aspects of memory, the search for truth and the brain’s role in guiding our moral compass all come together in Dr. Liam Durcan’s acclaimed first novel

While science can unravel many of the mysteries of the head, understanding the human heart is a different matter.

That is one of the paradoxes Montreal neurologist Liam Durcan explores in García’s Heart, a highly acclaimed first novel about a neurologist whose beloved mentor and good friend is on trial for heinous war crimes.

The novel, set in The Hague, Montreal, Detroit, Honduras and Boston, examines the complexities of criminal culpability, the fallibility of memory, the science of neurology, the search for the truth and the moral choices we all make.

“I wanted the book to be about a person’s search for the truth, an exploration of the ways in which we see ourselves and those around us as moral agents,” says Dr. Durcan from his office at the Montreal Neurological Hospital.

While García’s Heart embraces tough issues, it is full of the touches that make a novel eminently readable: flawed but likable characters, a gripping storyline, funny details and wry observations.

“The story and the characters have to come first, and both need to be compelling,” says Dr. Durcan. “The conflict and themes that arise have to make emotional and psychological sense to the reader.”

For Dr. Durcan, once his medical career was firmly established, it was natural for him to turn to his other love, fiction writing, and put pen to paper.

“As a physician, you are exposed to so many stories and the intimate details of people’s lives,” says Dr. Durcan. “And you hear the different ways that people relate their stories to you. In that way, being a writer, a storyteller, is kind of closely related to being a physician.”

Born in Winnipeg, he recalls as a teenager talking to his pediatrician about becoming a writer and a doctor. “He told me that it was wiser to be a doctor, that being a writer was something I could do on the side but it wouldn’t necessarily pay the bills.”

He heeded that advice and after receiving his degree in medicine from the University of Manitoba, he went on to complete his residency in neurology at McGill University. Since 1994 he has worked as a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital, and is also an assistant professor at McGill University.

It was in the late 1990s that he found his old desire to write re-emerged, and he signed up for a workshop with the Quebec Writer’s Federation. Two of the stories he wrote in that workshop were published, and he went on to write a short story collection called A Short Journey by Car, chosen as a Globe & Mail top book of 2004.

Despite his full-time job at the hospital and being the father of two small children, Dr. Durcan manages to carve out two hours every evening, after the children are in bed, to write.

Winnipeg native Liam Durcan, author of García's heart.

“I am lucky that I was able to get in this habit and keep it up. I don’t ever have writer’s block and I seem to be motivated by the time pressure of only having that two-hour daily block. When I am at work it is all-consuming but perhaps in the back of my mind things(related to my fiction)are percolating.”

The narrative line of García’s Heart follows the neurologist Patrick who becomes involved in the case of Hernan García, on trial for participating in torture in Central America in the 1980s. The story revolves around determining García’s guilt or innocence and Patrick’s trying to come to terms with the nice, kind doctor he remembers. The reader is brought along for the journey, looking, like Patrick, for clues that will reveal the monster in García that he seems to have missed as a young man. As Patrick struggles with his conscience, and the pressures from the neuroeconomics company he abandoned in Boston, he must also face García’s daughter, his former lover.

As the novel moves from the present-day trial in The Hague to Patrick’s youth in Montreal when he first came to know García, Patrick struggles with the reliability of his own recollections, raising questions about the emotional and scientific aspects of memory.

“I think a character with Patrick’s training would be familiar with the weaknesses inherent in relying on memory, understanding that recollections are not simply the retrieval of documentary evidence but an active, creative, almost regenerative process fraught with inaccuracy,” says Dr. Durcan. “We’ve all had moments when we relate our memory of a certain event, a memory that seems so real, and yet others close to us who have shared the same experience recall the event in a radically different way, or dispute that the event occurred at all. Memory is a servant helping us make sense of the world . . . but that is no guarantee of accuracy.”

Dr. Durcan says research into memory has always intrigued him. “I’ve read articles where adults were asked whether or not they’d experienced certain events as children—gotten lost at a mall or spent a night in hospital or taken a ride on a hot air balloon—events particular enough they should be recalled, or disavowed if they didn’t happen. When presented with fabricated evidence that the event occurred—a(fabricated)picture of them in a balloon, for instance— many will ‘recall’ the event and elaborate on the details.”

One twist in the novel comes when Patrick is called by the lawyer of the accused to discuss the possibilities of a neurological defence. The attorney asks questions about how flaws in brain function or structure might mitigate García’s guilt. For a person to be held responsibile for a criminal act, a traditional view holds there must be mens rea, a guilty mind. The lawyer raises the possibility with Patrick that perhaps this concept of diminished responsibility could be widened, asking if newer imaging technology could show that García’s brain responded differently to a situation expected to evoke remorse or guilt in the average person.

“I was interested in how neuroscience is being used by some to evaluate or challenge or validate social constructs like criminal responsibility. Neuroscience is at its core, like all science, reductionist. Its strength lies in its attempt to break down complex systems into physical constituent parts,” says Dr. Durcan. “Our deeply held emotional beliefs, our memories and choices are dependent upon neural mechanisms. Admittedly, if taken too far, the reductionist approach can raise some problems. If behaviour can be reduced to the purely physical activity of neurons, over which we have no influence, then what is to stop a clever lawyer from claiming that every act, even a criminal one, is involuntary? In this way, neuroscience also brings our concept of free will under a scrutiny that makes even neuroscientists nervous.”

In his own practice, Dr. Durcan is keenly interested in stroke recovery and early treatment in stroke patients. “That’s the most exciting area of neurology right now,” he says.

He is working on a new novel that involves a narrator who has right-hemisphere brain damage. “It turns out he is not a reliable narrator but is not aware of his deficit.”

Dr. Durcan plans to keep on writing in his two-hour nightly block while keeping up his duties at McGill and the Montreal Neurological Hospital.

“So far it’s a balance I’ve been able to keep. My agent at one point suggested I take a few months off just to write. But for me, that would be like working in a vacuum. I can be a productive writer and a physician. I think I just thrive on that busy-ness. Besides, my patients like that I have other interests outside of medicine and are very supportive of my writing.”