Tag: war

Author, Book review, Croatia, Fiction, literary fiction, Little, Brown, New York, Publisher, Sara Nović, Setting, war, Yugoslavia

‘Girl at War’ by Sara Nović

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Little, Brown; 336 pages; 2015. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.

Sara Nović’s debut novel, Girl at War, has the dubious honour of making me cry not once but twice.

This deeply affecting story is about a 10-year-old Croatian girl, Ana Juric, who is caught up in the Yugoslavian civil war of the early 1990s.

After her parents are brutally slaughtered, she endures a short stint as a “child soldier”, before her godfather arranges to get her out of the country. Smuggled into the United States, she is adopted by an Italian-American family, where her life looks set to be a happy one, but ten years on, haunted by what she experienced, she returns to her homeland to make peace with what happened.

Idyllic childhood disrupted by war

The book follows a non-linear timeline, so when we first meet Ana she is living in Zagreb with her working-class parents and baby sister. She is a happy-go-lucky tomboy, hanging out with her best friend Luka, when the war breaks out and Yugoslavia divides itself along religious and ethnic lines.

In school, we’d been taught to ignore distinguishing ethnic factors, though it was easy enough to discern someone’s ancestry by their last name. Instead we were trained to regurgitate pan-Slavic slogans: “Bratstvo i Jedinstvo!” Brotherhood and Unity. But now it seemed the differences between us might be important after all. Luka’s family was originally from Bosnia, a mixed state, a confusing third category. Serbs wrote in Cyrillic and Croats in the Latin alphabet, but in Bosnia they used both, the spoken differences even more minute. I wondered if there was a special brand of Bosnian cigarettes, too, and whether Luka’s father smoked those.

As the bombs and gunfights and air raids begin to dominate everyday life, we experience the claustrophobia, confusion and fear from a child’s perspective. Ana can see the destruction all around her and then come home and see it being broadcast on TV.

As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.

The book then jumps forward by 10 years. Ana is now living in New York, where she’s undertaking a degree in English literature, but we have no idea how she got there or what has happened to her in the intervening decade. Some of the gaps are filled in by a speech she is invited to make at the UN.

“There’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia,” I declared as the next slide flashed—two teenage girls sporting camouflage and scuff-marked assault rifles. “There is only a child with a gun.”

And this:

We were not like the children of Sierra Leone who, a continent away, were fighting their own battles that same year; we weren’t kidnapped and spoon-fed narcotics until we were numbed enough to kill, though now that it was over I sometimes wished for the excuse. We took no orders, sniped at the JNA from blown-out windows of our own accord, then in the next moment played cards and had footraces. And though I had learned to expel weapons from my everyday thoughts, speaking of them now I felt something I wasn’t expecting—longing. As jarring as the guns were to the pale crowd before me, for many of us they were synonymous with youth, coated in the same lacquer of nostalgia that glosses anyone’s childhood.

Hidden trauma

As an adult, Ana is deeply traumatised, perhaps suffering some form of PTSD, because she never sleeps and when she does, she experiences distressing night terrors. She passes as an American, not a Croat, so never tells anyone about her past. It is buried deep within. Not even her boyfriend knows her ethnic background.

In America, I’d learned quickly what it was okay to talk about and what I should keep to myself. “It’s terrible what happened there,” people would say when I let slip my home country and explained that it was the one next to Bosnia. They’d heard about Bosnia; the Olympics had been there in ’84.

But keeping up this pretence is exhausting. And the advent of 9/11 and the American’s “War on Terror” brings up all kinds of memories and conflicting emotions.

The country was at war, but for most people the war was more an idea than an experience, and I felt something between anger and shame that Americans—that I—could sometimes ignore its impact for days at a time. In Croatia, life in wartime had meant a loss of control, war holding sway over every thought and movement, even while you slept. It did not allow for forgetting. But America’s war did not constrain me; it did not cut my water or shrink my food supply. There was no threat of takeover with tanks or foot soldiers or cluster bombs, not here.

Ana begins to realise that she needs to confront her traumatic past in order to get on with her life. She wants to know what happened to her friend Luka and his parents, for instance, and so, using her savings, and in defiance of her adopted family’s wishes, she goes back to her homeland to find answers to those questions.

Her trip is detailed in the final section of the book. It’s a painful return, but it allows Ana to rediscover the good things (as well as the bad) that have shaped her identity and it gives us, the reader, the opportunity to find out how she was smuggled out of the country in a daring operation that so many of her compatriots would never have been able to achieve.

Girl at War is a powerful story about grief, exile and war — and the trauma that endures long after hostilities have ceased.

Anita Shreve, Author, Book review, Fiction, France, historical fiction, literary fiction, Little, Brown, London, Publisher, Setting, USA, war

‘The Lives of Stella Bain’ by Anita Shreve

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Stella-Bain

Fiction – Kindle edition; Little, Brown Book Group; 272 pages; 2013.

I’ve read a lot of Anita Shreve in my time (12 books in total and all reviewed here), but it’s been a while since I last dipped into one of her novels — for no other reason than too many titles by other authors have been competing for my time. So, after recently finishing Anne Tyler’s rather marvellous A Spool of Blue Thread, I was in the mood for something similar and Shreve immediately sprang to mind.

I like Shreve’s work because it mixes journalistic realism with great storytelling: she tends to eschew literary flourishes for simple, yet elegant, prose. Her female characters are always strongly drawn. They’re often ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, which test them on all kinds of levels, whether that be physical, emotional or psychological. And she’s not afraid to explore moral or ethical dilemmas, or make her characters do unexpected — and sometimes unwise — things. She’s also very skilled at creating the intimate details of families.

A woman with amnesia

The Lives of Stella Bain, published a couple of years ago, is the author’s 18th novel. It’s set during World War One and tells the story of Stella Bain, an American who volunteers to work in the makeshift hospitals on the battlefields of France.

One day she wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of who she is or why she’s there. She thinks her name is Stella Bain, but she cannot be sure, and she knows that she can drive an ambulance and is an exceptional artist. Everything else, however, is a mystery.

When given some leave, she heads to London convinced that the clue to her identity lies with the Admiralty. But not long after her arrival she begins to feel overwrought. She’s taken in by a young woman, Lily Bridge, who is married to Doctor Augustus Bridge, a surgeon who specialises in cranial surgery. He is also experimenting with “talk therapy” to help his patients.

This is all rather fortuitous for Stella, because Dr Bridge is able to help her, over quite a long period of time, to recover her past. When she finally recalls her true identity, she heads back to the US to re-establish contact with her family…

Far from predictable

This might all sound rather straightforward, or even predictable, but Shreve throws in a few curveballs by making Stella’s past history a little dubious — she once had an affair, for instance — and there are questions over her reasons for fleeing the States and heading to France long before the US had even joined the war. What is she running from — and why?

I’m not going to give away the answer to that here, obviously, but long-time Shreve fans may be interested to know that “Stella” is a character from one of Shreve’s earlier novels — the historical drama All He Ever Wanted — which adds an extra dimension to the story. Of course, it’s not necessary to have read that book, but it does provide a rather nice a-ha-penny-dropping moment if you have.

While the story could be viewed as being about a woman with amnesia, it actually goes a lot deeper than that: it’s about love and war; shell shock and emotional damage; psychotherapy and the fragile relationships between doctors and patients; what it’s like to work on the battlefields helping people who perhaps cannot be helped; and the importance of identity to our lives.  And mid-way through it turns into a rather intriguing court case that turns Stella’s story into a fight for something more important than herself.

All in all, I found this book a real treat. Yes, it’s too reliant on coincidence; yes, it occasionally veers worryingly close to sentimentality; and yes, the present tense narrative can be a little wearing. But on the whole it’s a well crafted story about a plucky woman refusing to give up her search for meaning when the odds are so clearly stacked against her. It’s also a fascinating insight into the effects of shell shock on a non-combatant, a subject I’ve not come across in fiction before.

Author, Book review, England, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Manybooks.net, Publisher, Setting, W. Somerset Maugham

‘The Hero’ by W. Somerset Maugham

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The-hero

Fiction – Kindle edition; Manybooks.net; 211 pages; 1901.

A couple of years ago I read W. Somerset Maugham’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece Of Human Bondage and loved its mix of grim reality, heartbreak and poignancy. I didn’t review it at the time, but it did make my list of favourite books of 2013, and I made a mental note to explore more of his work.

The Hero is probably one of his lesser-known novels. First published in 1901 — fourteen years before Of Human Bondage — it explores social mores, class and morality in Victorian England. And yet there’s something quite modern about the story, which shows how a man’s outlook on life can be changed by worldly experience, and how inward-looking, parochial and claustrophobic small town life can be.

A war hero’s return

The hero of the title is James Parsons, a soldier awarded the Victoria Cross during the Boer War, who returns to his small village in Kent, England, feeling anything but heroic. Five years earlier, he had gone straight from Sandhurst to India and then on to the Cape. Before moving abroad he was betrothed to Mary, who has patiently waited for his return and become much-loved by her soon-to-be parents-in-law in the process.

But when Jamie comes back to England he realises that he has no feelings for Mary. He knows it is his duty to marry her  “and yet he felt he would rather die”. That’s because he is rather obsessed with a married woman he met in India — the wife of his best friend — and though nothing really happened between them he thinks of her all the time.

He paraded before himself, like a set of unread school-books, all Mary’s excellent qualities. He recalled her simple piety, her good-nature, and kindly heart; she had every attribute that a man could possibly want in his wife. And yet—and yet, when he slept he dreamed he was talking to the other; all day her voice sang in his ears, her gay smile danced before his eyes. He remembered every word she had ever said; he remembered the passionate kisses he had given her. How could he forget that ecstasy? He writhed, trying to expel the importunate image; but nothing served.

When he makes the decision to break off his engagement, Jamie unwittingly offends everyone in the village — including his parents — who had only days earlier given him a hero’s welcome.

They had set him on a pedestal, and then were disconcerted because he towered above their heads, and the halo with which they had surrounded him dazzled their eyes. They had wished to make a lion of James, and his modest resistance wounded their self-esteem; it was a relief to learn that he was not worth making a lion of. Halo and pedestal were quickly demolished, for the golden idol had feet of clay, and his late adorers were ready to reproach him because he had not accepted with proper humility the gifts he did not want. Their little vanities were comforted by the assurance that, far from being a hero, James was, in fact, distinctly inferior to themselves. For there is no superiority like moral superiority. A man who stands akimbo on the top of the Ten Commandments need bow the knee to no earthly potentate.

From there, the story twists and turns — will they get back together again? will Jamie track down the woman he truly loves? — as it winds its way towards an utterly shocking and heartbreaking ending.

Romance, war and morality

At its most basic level The Hero is a simple love story gone wrong, which confronts in no uncertain terms the 19th century idea that marriage was a contract between two people regardless of whether they loved one another or not.

On a deeper level, it explores Victorian morality — sexual restraint and a strict social code of conduct under a rigid class system — and shows how it’s not always clear-cut and leads to unhappy outcomes. Jamie’s stance, of doing the “right” thing for him and Mary, highlights the strength of character required to stand up for one’s own convictions in the face of total opposition.

War — and courage — is a metaphor that runs throughout the narrative. From Jamie’s time on the battlefield, he knows that sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good — he applies those same lessons to his love life, even if that means he is seen as being cold and hard-hearted:

The general in battle now is afraid to strike because men may be killed. Sometimes it is worth while to lose men. When we become soldiers, we know that we cease to be human beings, and are merely the instruments for a certain work; we know that sometimes it may be part of a general’s deliberate plan that we should be killed. I have no confidence in a leader who is tender-hearted.

Overall, I really loved this book. The characters, albeit stereotyped, are just wonderful: so parochial and meddling, but with their hearts ultimately in the right place. And it’s written in such a humane way that even though some of them are dreadful busybodies and  full of their own self-importance, you admire their desire to protect Mary’s reputation — at whatever cost.

The Hero is an utterly tragic tale, but Maugham never manipulates his reader’s emotions for effect — instead he builds up a picture of Jamie’s moral dilemma, his inner-most turmoil and the courage required to plough his own furrow — and allows you to come to your own conclusions. It’s a style I like… and I’m delighted there’s so many more Maugham books left for me to explore…

Afghanistan, Atiq Rahimi, Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Vintage

‘The Patience Stone’ by Atiq Rahimi

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The Patience Stone
Fiction – paperback; Vintage; 136 pages; 2009. Translated from the French by Polly McLean.

If you want to read an important book about the subjugation of women, then put Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone on the top of your list. This novella, first published in France in 2008, won the Goncourt Prize that same year. It’s a rather shocking and deeply affecting read, and I know it will stay with me for a long time to come.

A bedroom confession

The Patience Stone is set in a single room in a war-torn city in Afghanistan. Outside, gun fire and explosions can be heard, along with the hurried footfalls of men carrying weapons, but inside the room it is largely quiet.

The room is small. Rectangular. Stifling, despite the paleness of the turquoise walls, and the two curtains patterned with migrating birds frozen mid-flight against a yellow and blue sky. Holes in the curtains allow the rays of the sun to reach the faded stripes of a kilim. At the far end of the room is another curtain. Green. Unpatterned. Concealing a disused door. Or an alcove.

In this room there is a man and a woman: the man is in a coma, with a bullet in his neck, and he is lying on his back under a dirty white sheet, his gaze fixed on the ceiling; the woman — his wife — sits beside him, feeding him through a tube, lubricating his eyes with drops and all the while praying for his recovery.

When the unnamed woman is not praying, she fills the time and the silence by talking to her husband — she treats him like a “patience stone” to which you:

“…tell all your problems to, all your struggles, all your pain, all your woes… to which you confess everything in your heart, everything you don’t dare tell anyone. You talk to it, and talk to it. And the stone listens, absorbing all your words, all your secrets, until one fine day it explodes. Shatters into tiny pieces.”

And what a confession this woman makes. Initially her voice is timid and afraid  — “Don’t abandon me, you’re all I have left” — but it grows increasingly angry as she comes to terms with the fact that the pair have been abandoned by her husband’s family. Only her aunt, an outcast herself, has stood by her and helps looks after the couple’s two young daughters.

But as the story progresses, this rage is then turned towards her husband, as she recalls their life together — the first three years of their arranged marriage were spent apart while he fought in the war — and the ways in which he has abused her — sexually, physically and emotionally — ever since their marriage was consummated.

Women as second-class citizens

On the whole, the woman’s tale is largely a sexual confession, where her needs have been wholly subjugated by her husband’s desires. She rails against the way she has been treated as nothing more than an object for her husband’s sexual gratification, then made to feel dirty and whore-like for daring to menstruate.

Her bold revelations might be heart-breaking, painful and courageous — they get increasingly more fevered and explosive as the story progresses, she’s definitely no puritan and there are hints she’s becoming unhinged — but they give voice to millions of women who have suffered at the hands of male brutality and patriarchal tribal customs throughout the centuries.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what goes on in this room between the silent man and the uncensored woman is a microcosm of society in Afghanistan today, where women are second-class citizens, denied basic rights to education, health care and personal independence. For that reason, reading this novella filled me with a slow-burning fury, not dissimilar to the reaction I had when I read The Bookseller of Kabul in 2005.

A confronting read

There’s no doubt that The Patience Stone  shines a light on some confronting and challenging truths — about war, religion, men, sex and misogyny — but it’s done in a rather understated way.

Its gentle, stripped-back prose is possessed of astonishing power, perhaps because it reads like a play, complete with stage directions — “In the street we hear someone shouting Halt! And then a gunshot. And footsteps, fleeing” — and a dramatic monologue. I kept thinking it would make a terrific film because it felt so visual and emotional — and then I discovered it was made into one last year:


I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to rent it, but it’s definitely gone on to my wish list. If it’s anything like the book, it will be compelling, intimate — and unforgettable.

 

Author, Book review, Fiction, Italy, literary fiction, Publisher, Richard Bausch, Setting, Tuskar Rock Press, war

‘Peace’ by Richard Bausch

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Peace

Fiction – hardcover; Tuskar Rock; 171 pages; 2009.

There’s a lot to be said for short, succinct books, especially if they deliver punches that feel more powerful — and more targeted — than might be achieved by novels of much longer length. It takes a particular skill to craft stories that have been honed to the bare minimum without losing the essence of what makes them special.

Richard Bausch, an American writer, has that rare talent to convey meaning and emotion in a tightly written narrative in which every word has to justify its existence. No surprise, then, that he’s largely known as a short story writer.

Peace, first published in 2009 — in the then new Atlantic imprint Tuskar Rock started by Colm Toibin — proves that in the right hands a story doesn’t have to be 500 pages long to have an impact. I came away from this one reeling not only with the drama of it, but also the beauty of Bausch’s lyrical, stripped-back prose hugely reminiscent at times of all those Irish writers I’ve come to know and love. On more than one occasion I was reminded of John McGahern — which is high praise indeed.

Dying days of war

The story is set in Italy at the tail end of the Second World War. A group of American soldiers on foot patrol are trying to locate the enemy, which is on the retreat.

The weather is atrocious, the soldiers are exhausted (some are ill with dysentery) and morale is low. When their sergeant commits a war crime — he deliberately shoots an unarmed woman because “she would have shot us all if she could” — those who witness it are too foot-sore and weary to report it. But this one act hangs over all who saw it, haunting their days and their nights.

Three of those witnesses — Marson, Asch and Joyner — are sent on a reconnaissance mission, up a steep mountain with an old Italian man as a guide. What ensues is a difficult journey that is fraught with danger, not only from treacherous terrain and freezing rain and snow, but German snipers hidden in the woods.

Stress and fear

Under these stressful and challenging conditions the soldiers’ fears are heightened and yet they cannot forget what they saw the day before, discussing it over and over amongst themselves — was the act justified? should they forget it or report it? are they complicit in the crime? — which only serves to deepen the ructions and tensions between them.

This is a useful device for Bausch to examine each man’s character, to fill in their back stories and to explore their own individual morals and beliefs. What emerges is a carefully drawn portrait of a trio of soldiers, fighting on the same side, but all with different prejudices, opinions, fears and foibles.

“You guys are Christians,” Asch said. “You believe in an angry God who’s interested in payback. Right? ‘Vengeance is mine’ — all that. Well, we’re gonna pay for yesterday. I think we might be paying for it now.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Joyner said. “Let go of it, will you? It’s our religion so we’re the ones who’ll go to hell, not you.”
“I’m not even going to answer that,” Asch said. “Jesus, Joyner. The way your mind works.”
“It’s stupid to argue about it here,” Marson said.

Creeping sense of unease

As the narrative progresses, the reader begins to share the soldiers’ growing sense of unease and paranoia: will they be ambushed by the enemy? Is the Italian man as innocent as he purports to be? Is their mission a complete waste of time?

Peace explores all kinds of issues assorted with war, not least the fine line between courage and fear, and the temptation to behave in ways that would be out of keeping under normal, peace-time circumstances. It highlights the immense task that young, largely immature, men had to endure: Asch and Joyner are barely out of their teens, and Marson, who is their corporal, is only in his mid-20s and yet here they are confronting death — the likelihood of theirs, the prospect of killing others — on a daily basis. Bausch never makes them heroic, but instead shows their innermost struggles to make sense of a world gone mad. There is fear, foreboding and anger on almost every page, but there is also tenderness and heartbreak as each man determines what it is to be good in the face of so much horror.

Despite being less than 180 pages, this is an emotionally intelligent book dealing with weighty themes. It brims with tension and moral complexity but is dotted with lovely moments of quiet reflection that make it an astonishing, curiously gripping and heartfelt read.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Iraq, Kevin Powers, literary fiction, Publisher, Sceptre, Setting, USA, war

‘The Yellow Birds’ by Kevin Powers

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Yellow-birds

Fiction – hardcover; Sceptre; 240 pages; 2012.

You’ve probably heard a lot about this book already. It’s been reviewed here, there and everywhere. And just a couple of weeks ago it won the Guardian First Book Award. It is, quite frankly, an astonishingly good first novel. It is not only a devastating account of the Iraq war, it is a compelling exploration of the aftermath on those who return home shell-shocked and psychologically damaged.

A promise that can’t be kept

The author, Kevin Power, served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq. The Yellow Birds might be fiction, but I expect quite a lot of it is rooted in fact.

The first person narrator is  John Bartle, 21, who befriends Daniel Murphy, 18, when the pair of them are in training at Fort Dix.  For no other reason than they are both from Richmond, Virginia, Bartle takes “Murph” under his wing, a bit like an older brother would, and then makes a promise to Murphy’s mother that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

“And you’re going to look out for him, right?” she asked.
“Um, yes, ma’am.”
“And Daniel, he’s doing a good job?”
“Yes, ma’am, very good.” How the hell should I know, lady? I wanted to say. I barely knew the guy. Stop. Stop asking me questions. I don’t want to be accountable. I don’t know anything about this.
“John, promise me that you’ll take care of him.”
“Of course.” Sure, sure, I thought. Now you reassure me and I’ll go back and go to bed.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to him, right? Promise that you’ll bring him home to me.”
“I promise,” I said. “I promise I’ll bring him home to you.”

Of course, it’s glaringly obvious that Murph is not going to return home from war, but the manner in which he dies and the events leading up to his death are far from straightforward.

I could say the same about the structure of this book, which swings backwards and forwards in time between Bartle’s pre-war life, his tour of duty and his repatriation. This fragmented and disorientating format serves to mirror Bartle’s mindset — it is an ingenious way to tell a story that is very much focused on the psychological fallout of war.

This means The Yellow Birds is not an easy read. If you like linear narratives, you may well find this one confusing, although it is broken into clearly signposted sections — “September 2004: Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq” and “November 2005: Richmond, Virginia”, for instance — to help guide your way.

A confronting and often disturbing read

The Yellow Birds is also confronting — as you would expect from a story about war. But even though I’ve read countless books of this nature (and grisly true crime), there were many scenes depicted here that I found particularly gruesome and disturbing (a booby-trapped body on a bridge, for example) and even throwaway lines — “The bodies were hidden in alleys, were found in bloating piles in the troughs of the hills outside the cities, the faces puffed and green, allergic now to life” — possessed the devastating power to shock.

But it was the detached, numb-with-grief voice of Bartle upon his return to the US that I found most chilling. This glimpse into a returned soldier’s mind, unable to deal with the future based on what had happened in his past, is what I will remember most about this harrowing, heartbreaking tale. His loneliness, his despair, his anger — and his embarrassment — resonates off the page.

The Yellow Birds has been compared to Erich Maria Remarque’s classic Great War tale All Quiet on the Western Front — and with good reason. This is not a book that glorifies war or makes heroes out of those who take part; instead it illuminates the futility (and predictability), and leaves you with the burning question, what is the point of so much loss of life?

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Malaya, Myrmidon Books, Publisher, Setting, Tan Twan Eng

‘The Garden of Evening Mists’ by Tan Twan Eng

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Garden_of_evening_mists

Fiction – paperback; Myrmidon Books; 448 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists has been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. It is a beautiful tale set in the central highlands of Malaya about memory, forgetting, war, politics, atonement, redemption, forgiveness, gardening — and the Japanese art of horimono tattoos.

A judge looks back on her life

The story revolves around Teoh Yun Ling, the sole survivor of a secret Japanese slave-labour camp, who takes early retirement from her career as a judge at the Supreme Court in Kuala Lumpur. For the first time in almost 35 years, she returns to Yugiri, in the Cameron Highlands, where the beautiful Japanese garden called “Evening Mists” is located.

Six tall, narrow stones huddled into a miniature limestone mountain range in the centre of the pond. On the opposite bank stood the pavilion, duplicated in the water so that it appeared like a paper lantern hanging in mid-air. A willow grew a few feet away from the pavilion’s side, its branches sipping from the pond.

It was here, during the Malayan Emergency, that she met the garden’s designer, Nakamura Aritomo, and tried to convince him to create another Japanese garden as a tribute to her sister who died in the camp. Aritomo, the exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan, declined, but he agreed to take her on as an apprentice so that she could learn the necessary skills to create the garden herself.

From this narrative thread, other narrative threads begin to spool out, including: Teoh’s time in the slave-labour camp; her years living on the Majuba Tea Estate in the Cameron Highlands (where the threat of murder and kidnap by communist guerrillas put her life in constant danger); and her present situation in which she tries to fob off an historian, Professor Yoshikawa, seeking permission to use Aritomo’s artworks (woodblock prints) — now in her ownership — in a book he is writing to prove his hypothesis that the emperor’s gardener was also a tattoo artist.

These threads are told in a kind of random fashion, because they are revealed in a memoir that Judge Teoh is hurriedly writing before the illness with which she has been diagnosed leaves her unable to read or write. That illness is just one of many pieces of information she withholds from her friends. As the narrative gently unfurls we discover more of these secrets. It is not that she is an unreliable narrator, but that she only tells you what she wants you to know when she wants you to know it.

Surprise and mystery

As a result this is a novel full of surprises.

It is also a novel fully of mystery. I don’t think it’s a plot spoiler to say that midway through the novel Aritoma disappears — and no-one knows what happens to him. If he was enigmatic in life, he is even more enigmatic in death.

There’s also the curious notion of how Judge Teoh managed to escape from a camp that no-one has ever heard of and one that even she cannot locate. And why does the Majuba Tea Estate seem immune to the war raging between the British and the Malayan nationalists — exactly which side is the owner on?

The garden as a focal point

The thing I most loved about The Garden of Evening Mists was the way in which Tan Twan Eng describes the garden and the art of creating it. I admit that I am a sucker for Japanese gardens, having learnt about them at university (as part of my studies in landscape architecture) and he brings to life their beauty, elegance and symbolism in an incredibly visual — and sensual — way.

And Judge Teoh is a wonderful creation; a Straits Chinese woman who hates the Japanese for what they did to her (and her sister) in the camp, but is able to put that aside to work closely with a Japanese man — even though his very presence reminds her of what it was like to be “a prisoner of the Japs”.

Sometimes the narrative falls into a slight lull, but the multi-layered storylines provide sufficient intrigue to maintain the reader’s interest.

Despite the gentleness of the prose, this is a book about extreme violence and cruelty in all its many facets.

But it does not paint things in black and white. This is a book full of light and shade, with the garden as its central focus, for it is the act of building the garden which helps heal the psychological wounds of both Judge Teoh and Aritomo. Later, it becomes a refuge, a place of solace, from the war happening in the hills beyond, and later still, it provides comfort to an ill woman trying to make sense of her extraordinary life.

Author, Book review, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, Josephine Hart, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Virago

‘The Truth About Love’ by Josephine Hart

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Truth-about-love

Fiction – paperback; Virago Press; 256 pages; 2009.

I first read Josephine Hart, the Irish-born British writer, in the early 1990s. Her first two novels, Damage and Sin, were page-turners of the highest order. But I never got around to reading any of her later work. When I stumbled upon the last novel she wrote — The Truth About Love — in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago for the princely sum of £1.99 it seemed an excellent opportunity to reacquaint myself with her writing.

A story about memory

Despite the somewhat soppy title, The Truth About Love is not romantic fiction. This is a powerful story about history, guilt and trying to move on in a world that never forgets. No surprise then that the two central figures in the book are German and Irish — one of whom is trying to forget the past; the other for whom history is everything.

The story opens in rather spectacular style when we are thrust into the disorientating thoughts of someone dying — “Get a priest and a doctor! Quickly! Quickly! Get a priest! Confession! Get priest first!” The entire first chapter is like this — all confusion and people shouting things at one another with only little snippets of information being revealed. I initially thought it was set somewhere on the battlefields of the First World War, only to discover it was somewhere in rural Ireland in 1962 — and later I was even more astonished to discover that it was a teenage boy who had been fatally wounded in an unexplained explosion in his family’s back garden.

That explosion — and death — haunts the O’Hara family for the entire novel. The mother, Sissy, never quite recovers from the loss of her son, despite her husband’s efforts to comfort and console her. And matters are only made worse when the local community begins to circulate rumours that the boy may have been making explosives for the IRA — although the family claim he was merely making a rocket.

Personal tragedy

While this family tragedy shapes the core of the novel, Hart manages to place it in a wider context by using it as a metaphor for the great tragedies of the first half of the 20th century — specifically the Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War, and the Irish War of Independence, where sometimes families were pitted against other families, and hundreds of men and women died.

There’s a very telling conversation quite early on in the novel, when Tom O’Hara, the grieving father, approaches his German neighbour about the possibility of buying a gate from him. The gate, imported from Germany, has a helmet on it and was much admired by Tom’s son who called it “the warrior’s gate”. Tom wants to put it in the back entrance to his garden as a kind of memorial, but his neighbour is reluctant to part with it. He does, however, promise to consider the idea.

“[…] thank you about the gate. Considering it, at least. Like I said, you’ve been a gentleman to me. I won’t forget.”
“You’re Irish, Mr O’Hara. Forgetfulness is not possible.”
“And you’re German, Mr Middlehoff. No doubt memory is a burden.”

Over the course of the novel this theme recurs over and over, like a mantra, as it infuses each character’s outlook and actions.

A story about Ireland

Not a great deal happens in the novel — it’s more character driven than plot led — but it has multiple narrators who take up the story in turn. Through this, we learn of Mrs O’Hara’s inability to get over her loss (in her own words) and of Mr Middlehoff’s exile and the strange love affairs he conducts when he thinks no one is looking. And, of course, we learn about his past and how he views the country where he has exiled himself, a kind of outsider’s view of Ireland in the 1960s.

Ireland’s more recent tragic history —  especially the IRA’s attacks on mainland Britain in the 1970s and 80s — is taken up by the O’Hara’s daughter, Olivia, who leaves the country for England, where she marries and has children. Her first-person narrative, which begins somewhere around page 150,  looks back over the course of three decades and tells the story not only of Ireland, but of her family’s grief and Mr Middlehoff’s tangled past from a different perspective.

An intense read

The Truth About Love is by no means an easy read — and it is somewhat of a departure from the author’s earlier work. But there’s something about the prose —  fiery and elegant by turns — and her refusal to fill in all the gaps, so that the reader must make up their own mind about certain things, that reminds me very much of the best of Jennifer Johnston’s work.

It’s a very intense story, almost too intense, so that whenever I read it I began to feel claustrophobic. But with that intensity comes a power and an intelligence that marks this book as something rather special. Sadly, it was Hart’s last novel: she died from cancer in June last year.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, Fiction, Georgina Harding, literary fiction, Publisher, Romania, Setting

‘Painter of Silence’ by Georgina Harding

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Painter-of-silence

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury Publishing; 320 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence is one of those books that completely transports you into another world. The elegant language — Harding’s style is restrained but eloquent — and the Eastern European setting gives the novel a dreamlike quality, one that whisks you into another time and place, and then reveals the pain, heartbreak and horror of war in a rather understated but poignant way.

This deceptively gentle approach makes the story all the more affecting. I found it a quietly devastating read, one that lingers long after you have (reluctantly) finished it.

Set in Romania

It is set Iasi, Romania, during the early 1950s. The war might be over, but its effects are still being felt — and the Communists have ushered in a whole new set of fears. Many people are  adjusting to the new world order and some are continuing to look for loved ones that disappeared during the conflict.

When the book opens we meet Augustin, a rather strange and beguiling character wearing a lice-ridden coat and good military boots, who alights from a train, makes his way across a crowded city — trying not to cough “because he knows it will hurt” — but he carries no identity papers. The next morning he is found on the steps of a hospital.

It is clear by the dampness of him that he has spent the night out but it might be anyone’s guess how many previous nights he has spent outdoors. Certainly he does not appear, from the state of him, that he has lived a settled life or even fed regularly for a long time. He is frail as a young bird. […] The first few days they do not even attempt to ask him who he is. For most of the time he is either unconscious or so feverish that they cannot expect to get sense out of him. In his delirium he moans and cries out with strange animal cries, covering taut eyes with hands that seem too big, out of proportion with his emaciated body, scrabbling bone fingers across the sheets.

The hospital staff do not realise that Augustin is profoundly deaf — he was born that way — and cannot communicate, although he has a special talent for painting, drawing and creating paper cut-outs (the “Painter of Silence” of the title). He made a special trip to Iasi to track down a childhood friend, Safta, who is now a nurse at the hospital.

When Safta discovers Augustin is a patient, she is careful not to reveal to her colleagues that she knows him, because “it would be little help to him and none to herself”. We later discover that she is running away from a past, including a rather privileged background, for reasons of her own.

An idyllic childhood

The story charts Augustin’s slow recovery and his subsequent discharge from hospital. We gradually learn about his past, specifically his (almost) idyllic childhood growing up in a manor, owned by Safta’s parents, where his (unmarried) mother was the much-loved cook. We learn how Safta’s mother took Augustin under her wing, almost as if he was one of her own children, and helped to nurture his special talent for art, which flourished with her encouragement.

Despite his disability, he was never treated as an outcast, and the way in which Harding details his sibling-like relationship with Safta is probably the most touching aspect of this novel.

The pain of him watching Safta’s first fledgling love affair from the sidelines is especially moving, and then the knowledge that he can never leave the estate (because of his deafness) when war breaks out, is heartbreaking. But what is even more heartbreaking — and horrifying — is finding out what happens to him when he stays behind after everyone else has fled.

A story told through art

His experiences are revealed slowly via the drawings he makes for Safta. These are beautifully described by Harding — “figures on a road: black rectangles one beside the other like a row of ill-fitting teeth” — and these help bring Augustin’s story to life in a rich, visual way without the need for spoken words.

Harding writes beautifully about people and their relationships, and by using Augustin as a silent observer she is able to show the world through a different set of eyes.

Ultimately, Painter of Silence is a lovely atmospheric story, tinged by tragedy. It has just been longlisted for this year’s Orange Prize and, if there is any justice in the world, more prize listings will surely follow.

Author, Book review, England, Fiction, historical fiction, J.L. Carr, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting

‘A Month in the Country’ by J.L. Carr

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A-Month-in-the-Country

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 84 pages; 2000.

There’s something about J.L. Carr’s Booker-nominated A Month in the Country which feels as if it was written long before its 1980 publication date. The story is a rather gentle and subtle one, ripe with religious symbolism, and it is so evocative of a long-lost English summer that whenever you lift your head from the page you expect to see blue skies, sunshine and fields of yellow-bright rape seed blowing in the breeze.

My edition comes with a rather good introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald, and a short forward by J.L. Carr himself, who says the idea of the book “was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. […] I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart”.

I’ve not read Hardy’s novel, so I can’t make a comparison, but I think Carr has definitely succeeded on the tug-at-the-heart element.

The story is a simple one about a young English soldier, Tom Birkin, who returns from the Great War and undertakes a special project: to uncover a medieval mural inside a church.

Tom, a Londoner, is not used to rural life. But in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby he finds the peace and quiet an antidote to his military experience, which has left him with a disturbing facial tick.

The marvellous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War […] had done to me and begin where I’d left off. This is what I need, I thought — a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

He befriends another former solider — and outsider — at work in the village, Charles Moon, who is looking for a lost medieval grave near the church.

He also develops two key relationships with female residents — 14-year-old precocious schoolgirl Kathy Ellerbeck, and the vicar’s young, beautiful wife, Alice Keach — both of them platonic, although the latter provides a frisson of sexual tension. I won’t spoil it by telling you what happens!

As Tom slowly, methodically sets about gently removing the whitewash from the painting, he comes to know the inner-most workings of the village, its natives and their little secrets. There’s not much more to the story than his gentle adaptation to rural living, the friendships he makes and the recuperative power of time to heal emotional wounds.

A Month in the Country is an understated but heartfelt story. Because it is told from Tom’s point of view, looking back on his younger self, there’s a bittersweet edge to it, tinged as it is with nostalgia and regret. Not bad for a slim book that’s less than 100 pages long.