Review: Butterfly Mind

The ink-stained hack, the slovenly drunk, the chain-smoking Tums receptacle, the gruff-mannered amp of rumour and innuendo — that character has long haunted the newsrooms of fiction. Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock opens in a bar with the Daily Messenger’s Fred Hale slurping gin and ogling a fellow patron’s breasts, even after realizing he’s the target of a mob hit. In Bonfire of the Vanities, tabloid scribe Peter Fallow can’t crack his eyes in the morning without dread of headache, but wins a Pulitzer regardless.

For many reporters, these tales are more inspirational than cautionary. Launching his career as a foreign correspondent for cbc in the early 1980s, Patrick Brown took up this drink-sodden mantle with gusto. And in Butterfly Mind, a striking study of the eerie parallels between struggles with alcohol and autocrats, Brown admits he entered the trade regarding himself as “an old-school journalist heading toward the sound of gunfire armed with a battered portable typewriter and a bottle of Scotch.” By 1983, he was rousing himself every morning with a stiff screwdriver, followed promptly by a brisk retch. He justified the boozing as a well-deserved escape from the tragedies he had witnessed around the world. But the more he drank, the more he became a hack, until one day during the 1987 trial of Klaus “The Butcher of Lyons” Barbie, he cracked a beer, blacked out, and blew a deadline. His bosses intervened, calling Brown back to Canada for treatment.

Butterfly Mind exposes the vomit and liver rot of life “under a personal dictatorship as ruthless and hard to overthrow as any of the regimes I was covering.” But it is so much more than an ex-drunkard’s mea culpa; it’s also an incisive analysis of the major political convulsions of the past three decades by someone who’s witnessed a good number. Brown weaves his own decline into a larger tale of tyranny and resistance in Lebanon, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Burma, Bulgaria, and, especially, China, where he now lives. As he stumbles toward honesty, openness, and eventual recovery in his personal life, hope mounts that his political characters can do the same.