A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche, trans. Patricia Claxton

The power of Gil Courtemanche's novel lies in its journalistic detachment from the bestiality of the Rwandan genocide and its success in grafting an almost saccharine love story on the backdrop of the horrific events that left one million dead in 1994. Québecois journalist Bernard Valcourt, in Rwanda to set up a television station in the early 1990s, finds himself whiling away his time with other expats and self-important people around the pool at the luxury Hotel des Milles Collines in the capital, Kigali. The scene is much like any in an African troublespot: the UN is there, which means dollars, which means upmarket prostitutes, which means ministers, which means diplomats, which means gossip - which means there are journalists.

This parasitic little world of power, adrenaline and sex is overseen by jackdaws, ravens and buzzards, perched above the pool, in a hierarchy that echoes the ethnic obsessiveness of Rwandans. Hundreds of years ago, before the Belgians, these people realised that the Great Lakes marked a fault-line between the Bantu tribes - whose languages are related - and those they took to be descendants of Egyptians or Ethiopians. They lived in a misty land with a perfect climate and many hills, and they built kingdoms there.

By the time Belgian colonisers came, the Hutus - seen to be descendants of savage Bantu warriors - had been subjugated to the status of hoers and tillers. Their rulers were the Tutsis, nomadic cattle grazers who had arrived much later. The Belgians decided that the Hutus were dumb and had flat noses. They gave identity cards and jobs to Tutsis, whom they saw as tall, light-skinned and bright.

At the time Valcourt arrives, after several genocides over generations, the Hutus have the upper hand in government, but Aids decides who will live or die. Méthode, Cyprien and so many other of the journalist's friends believe they may as well die, or kill, through fornication as from the blows of a machete. Cyprien, who has Aids, combines the two on the day he finds his wife, Georgina, being raped at a roadblock. "Your wife has no pleasure," says a militiaman holding a gun to his head. "We've had her two at a time, one by the front, the other by the back door. And we did it hard ... Nothing. You know the secrets of the Tutsis so you're going to show us what to do to make your wife come."

The militiamen are passing out machetes in the neighbourhoods when Valcourt makes a move on Gentille, a waitress whose tragedy is that she is a Hutu who looks like a Tutsi: "so embarrassed by her beauty she has never smiled or spoken an unnecessary word". Valcourt does not know whether he wants to be her father or lover, and the novel occasionally comes close to idealising their relationship beyond the limits of the credible.

But we need Gentille because we require someone who can escape the (rightly) derogatory sub-clauses that define every character: aid workers, like André, "who distributes condoms and thus is an expert on Aids", are no better than ambitious Tutsis who "aspire only to set up a new dictatorship", or the Canadian UN commander who is "unassuming, apprehensive, ineloquent and naive, like Canada".

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali provides a picture of the cynicism of the aid industry which has resonance beyond the hills of Rwanda. By being factually correct and remaining sufficiently detached from the incomprehensible awfulness of the genocide, Courtemanche has succeeded where many writers have failed. And he has given us a book which may help keep the Rwandan genocide in our memories.