The Garden of Evening Mists

The Garden of Evening Mists

Tan Twan Eng

 

This is a complex and interesting story, provoking questions on some interesting themes.  It is set in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation of World War II and the later communist rebel uprisings, and in Malaysia 34 years later.  The two main characters are Aritomo, an esteemed Japanese gardener previously employed by the Emperor, who had moved to Malaya before the war, and Yun Ling, an Anglophile "Straits Chinese" woman, the sole survivor of a Japanese POW camp.  A third major character is Magnus, the owner of a tea estate, Majuba, in the Cameron Highlands, and a survivor of the British concentration camps of the Boer War. 

 

The main theme is how survivors of the brutality and treachery of war can live out the rest of their lives in a multi-cultural world.  I found it an interesting and original problem.

 

The characters of both Yun Ling and Aritomo provoke questions and their mysterious pasts propel the narrative.  How did Yun Ling manage to survive the notorious internment camp system, and why did Aritomo stay aloof from the Japanese rape of Malaya?  (Another question is raised about Yun Ling's father and brother, businessmen who prospered during the war at a time when those who were not against the Japanese were abetting them.  Yun Ling's mother seems to know the answer and has collapsed into mental illness.)

 

Aritomo is clearly a man of influence; during the war, he intervened with the Japanese invaders on behalf of Magnus and the workers on his estate.  After the war, he paid off the Communist rebels to ensure the safety of Majuba and his own garden, Yugiri.  Is he protecting his friends or subsidizing the rebels?  Is he an accommodator or a pragmatist or a Japanese agent?  What are his motives?

 

Yun Ling's life is brought together with Aritomo's when she apprentices herself to him in order to learn the art of Japanese gardening so she can make a garden to commemorate her sister who perished in the camp.

 

The two develop a complicated relationship and eventually become lovers.  She learns gardening and archery from him and the serenity of the garden helps in her healing.  He learns about the atrocities committed by the Japanese and in a sado-masochist exchange creates a personalized "horimono" or tattoo over her entire back.  Then he mysteriously disappears forever into the jungle whose many trails he knows by heart.

 

There are many tangled threads in this plot and the switching of time frames does not make it easy to unravel them.  This is part of the mood - the misty garden edging the jungle, and the clouded, complicated past of Aritomo and Yun Ling. 

 

The character of Aritomo is particularly enigmatic.  I could not even establish his sexual preference.  He is passionless and controlled; his Japanese men friends have been gay.  His wartime relationship with Tominaga, the leader of Yun Ling's internment camp is suspicious.  My conclusion is that he had been embedded in Malaya by the Emperor of Japan and that the story of his falling-out with his employer was false.  He has to face his past when he hears Yun Ling's accounts of the suffering in the camp.  His suicide says that some actions are unforgiveable.

 

Unfortunately, in his effort to create a mood of mystery and secrecy around his main characters, the author fails to create empathy for them.  The complexity and culpability of both Aritomo and Yun Ling make their dilemmas intellectual rather than emotional.  The story of the wartime love affair between Tatsuji, the kamikaze pilot, and Teruzen who flew in his place, is more moving than the love affair between the two main characters.

 

Tan Twan Eng has set himself a difficult task:  how to sustain sympathy for unlikeable main characters.  Aritomo is a man who would show his love and contrition by creating a work of art and also lie to his lover that he had never done one before.  Likewise we learn that Yun Ling survived the prison camp because she was an informer on her fellow captives and countrymen.  After the war she became a judge who was merciless with Japanese militants and their collaborators, partly to appease her own conscience.  She is not an easy person to like; she does not like herself and her medical diagnosis leaves us unmoved.

 

Both characters are trying to become, "straight-shooters" with their archery practice and their search for the centre of the target, but these are not Cupid's arrows, and the characters remain passionless in their romance and appeal to readers.

 

This novel interested me especially because of the accounts of the Japanese labour camps during the war.  Having had an uncle who barely survived working on the Burma Railroad, I was appalled to learn recently that although the horrors of the Holocaust are well publicized, the Japanese atrocities and the Rape of Nanking have been subsumed by the horror of Hiroshima, and are not taught to today's students.  Jewish people have rightly taken steps to ensure that their loss will never be forgotten, but there is no lasting support group for the victims of the Japanese, and their suffering seems in vain.  A novel such as this keeps the historical record of Japanese atrocities in World War II on the public conscience.

 

However, I was disappointed to have these historical events lumped together with the activities of The Golden Lily, an organization that exists in the realm of conspiracy theorists.  The Golden Lily is supposed to have been a cadre trusted by the Emperor of Japan to loot the treasures of conquered countries and hide them until after the war when they could be put into the Emperor's coffers.  The remarkable resurgence of the Japanese economy after the war is said to have been financed by this plunder.  The answer to the riddle of Aritomo is that he was part of The Golden Lily.  Although this plot resolution is clever, I resent that it is coupled with the facts of the Japanese labour camps, putting the historical camps in the same category as the conjectured Golden Lily organization.  The strong message about the horrors of the camps is diluted by association.

Ship of Brides

By

Jojo Moyes

 

This is an interesting historical novel about the aircraft carrier Victorious which brought 655   war brides from Sydney to Portsmouth in 1946.  These very young women of all backgrounds were forced to live together in cramped makeshift quarters on the high seas for almost six weeks.  Their only commonality was their uncertain future in a strange land, the newness of their marriages to men they hardly knew, and their homesickness for the land of their birth which most would never see again.  It was a social experiment for all involved, passengers and crew.

The narrative follows the occupants of one cabin: a society girl from Sydney, a pregnant farm girl from the outback, a war nurse who had married a patient, and a 16-year old whose husband held the ticket to a better chance for her.  Two other major characters are the captain who is struggling with psychological and physical wounds sustained in the sinking of the sister ship of Victorious near the end of the war, and one of the marines who stood guard duty over the women after curfew every evening. 

It is an interesting mix of characters and the setting is fraught with suspense for the future and raw memories of the recent past.  There are interesting passages about the survivors of the Japanese POW camps, the war in the Pacific, hospital camps and life in Australia during the war.

The story opens at a ship dismemberment yard in India where one of the brides, now a grandmother, sees the old carrier being finally scrapped.  Throughout the book, we wonder which of the four brides she will turn out to be.   The shipyard setting is surreal in itself, as anyone who has seen pictures of those workplaces will know. 

 

The book is interesting historically and also philosophically with its  loose theme of putting old traumas and sins behind one when the opportunity to make a new life arises.  Forgiveness and moral strength are valued qualities. 

The mood is suspenseful  as the plot develops and new details about the characters' pasts are revealed, but the characters themselves are not very complex.  The writer is a romance writer who has done some interesting research and found a story that is full of possibilities.  On the whole she has done well with it, although some of the scenes are melodramatic and much too drawn out.  The framework which focusses the story on a small representative group is engaging and clever.

 

The book is an easy, good, and worthwhile read. The shared experience of the voyage makes its mark on all the characters and leaves the reader more reflective and appreciative of the sacrifices and hopes that marked the end of World War II.

 

Home by Toni Morrison

                                               Home
                                       Toni Morrison

How many themes does a novel need?  I could have used a GPS to navigate the many paths that Toni Morrison takes us down in her latest book, Home.  Is this an account of a road trip?  Is this about a young man with post- traumatic stress following the Korean War?  Is this about the plight of black Americans in the 1950s?  Is it, as the title suggests, about the green, green grass of home? But then, why is the opening poem about self-awareness?  Maybe it's about learning to be a man like the brutal horses who 'stood like men.'  It's all of these things, in 145 pages.  At Can.$25.95, maybe I'm getting my money's worth with so many ideas to chew through.  Or maybe I'm asking myself, "Where's the editor of this tangle?"

 

I'll focus on the positive:   Morrison has created a full and likable character in Frank, the protagonist and he engages my interest. He is complex and sympathetic.  As a toddler he took responsibility for his baby sister, Cee, and he never wavered in his role as her protector.   She is the constant in his life which he recognizes: "Deep down inside her lived my secret picture of myself - a strong good me… p.103"  He is a decent kid who had never left his home in rural Georgia until he went to the freezing front of the Korean War where he lost his two childhood friends, saw atrocities and committed them himself, and came home damaged, shell-shocked and alcoholic.  The main narrative concerns his search for recovery and I admire his persistence.

 

The other character to whom I responded is Frank's girlfriend, Lily.  In one strong chapter, which reads like a short story, she decides that loneliness is a price she is willing to pay to find self-fulfilment through ambition and independence.  But Lily then disappears from the narrative and her contribution to the plot is unclear.

 

Insight into the characters is enhanced by the experimental and interesting technique of inserting italicized first-person passages which sometimes contradict the third-person narrator.  Another less successful experiment is the random appearances of a mystery man dressed in a zoot-suit.  His role is puzzling.

 

I expected some lovely writing from this winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in many passages I was not disappointed:  "He pulled the trigger.  The click from the empty chamber was both tiny and thunderous." And, "egg yolks, not sliding now, but stuck like phlegm to the window."  Frank experiences, "the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else's fault."  These passages are evocative.

 

But I am at a loss with, "the sound of a cheap cello coming from a chute of cattle…", a "heart jump of sorrow,"  a woman in a wheelchair who is "quick as a hummingbird," and a face which, "seemed to morph into the front of a jeep."  Morph?

 

Despite my enjoyment of some of the characters and language, Morrison's multitude of themes distanced me and left me unsatisfied.  The underlying theme is the poverty of Black America in the 1950s: poverty of opportunity, support, ambition and finances.  But some of the incidents, like the attack on the couple traveling on the train, did not advance the plot.  This would be acceptable in a longer work, but a short novel should be spare and focussed.  I thought that I was reading a road trip story.

Another important theme is the rehabilitation of black GIs after the Korean War, a big issue.  In Frank's case this is effected by his return to his nurturing home environment.  As the book is titled Home, it must be that an important theme is one's attachment to home, which in this book is Lotus, a run-down rural black settlement in Georgia. Ambivalent love of home is a familiar theme, starting with The Odyssey, but the depiction of Lotus is fuzzy.  At times this village seems soul-less, ignorant and dead-end, a place that offered Frank and Cee no guidance and no support, where the little girl was criticised by everyone, neighbours wagged their tongues, but no one intervened on their behalf.  Both children left at the first opportunity. But when the narrative suddenly segues to Cee's story, we hear her reminiscing fondly of a brook full of fish, gardens full of crops, and kindly neighbours fixing each others' front steps. At the end of the book, home is where redemption is found.  Frank and Cee discover a community of women rich in goodwill and traditional knowledge and values.  The rediscovery of the healing values of home, the Prodigal Son story, is a full theme in itself, but Morrison has so many themes going that she doesn't fully develop this one.

 In this potentially nurturing village, it seems that Frank and Cee's parents were the anomaly, too tired after work to care for their children.  Both children grew up to be scarred by the adult world for which their parents had given them no preparation. Thus, the importance of caring parenting would seem to be another theme.

But finally, I have concluded that Morrison's main theme must be self-knowledge and self-acceptance.  My evidence is the action in the first and last chapters, Frank's italicised first-person accounts, and the poem in the frontispiece:

                                                "Whose house is this?

                                       Whose house keeps out the light

                                                                In here?

                                                Say, who owns this house?

                                                            It's not mine.

                                     I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter

                            With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats;

                                   Of fields wide as arms open for me.

                                                   This house is strange.

                                                         Its shadows lie.

                                Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?"

 

The strong image created in the opening chapter with echoes in the final chapter must have significance.  It concerns the fighting stallions.  The opening sentence is, "They rose up like men.  We saw them.  Like men they stood."  And the chapter ends," They were so beautiful.  So brutal.  And they stood like men."  In the final action of the book, Frank nails a board to a tree beside the grave of a murdered man whom he had reburied as a mark of respect.  On the board he has written, "Here Stands a Man"

In the first-person account (p. 103) Frank talks about, "a strong good me tied to the memory of those horses and the burial of a stranger."

Cee also discovers the strength that comes from belief in herself, and under the tutelage of the Lotus women she learns not to lean on her brother.  Although I found this sudden identification and resolution of her need too abrupt and tidy, it does illustrate the importance of this theme.

Persistent excavation has enabled me to make some sense of this novel, but a cohesive and disciplined narration would have made it a much more satisfying read.  My verdict is that I was left  disappointed and unsatisfied by Morrison's lack of focus and disjointed narrative.  Too bad.

The Testament of Mary

Colm  Toibin

There are more portraits of the Virgin Mary than of any other woman in the world and all of them portray her as passive and submissive.  Colm Toibin has written a book about a different Mary, one who is resentful, defiant, broken-hearted, lonely and guilt-ridden.  No wonder it is controversial.

Mary’s darling son, the joy of her life, has given up his job and taken to roaming the countryside, disturbing the peace with a band of grown hobbledehoys.  When she meets him at a wedding in Cana, he says to her, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” How is a mother to feel?

This is Mary’s version of events, not a gospel, because Toibin thinks that she did not believe that Jesus was the son of God.  He was her beloved son and he moved away from her.  She watched him tortured and killed on a cross and she had to flee her home and die in a foreign land because of the persecution of his followers.  Even though the disciples now tell her that Jesus has saved the world, she retains the image of her son’s tragic death and she says, “It was not worth it.”

As Toibin recreates the time, the culture and Mary’s state of mind, he changes some events as they are traditionally told.  He thinks that the bloodlust of the crowd at the cross would have made it unsafe for Mary and the other women to stay with Jesus until the end.  He also takes a new look at the miracles that took place close to Nazareth, which Mary would have known about.  At the wedding in Cana, why did the host run out of wine?  Because there were so many uninvited guests, the followers of Jesus.  It behooved Jesus to rescue the host from his embarrassment.  The family of Lazarus were good friends of Mary’s family.  Jesus was too busy preaching to come to the bedside of Lazarus, his childhood friend who was suffering, according to Toibin, from intolerable headaches.  When Jesus raised his friend from death, the pains continued and furthermore, he had to deal with the reactions of his friends.  What exactly do you say to someone who has returned from the other side?

All mothers know the pain of separation as their loving and dependent little boys grow to be independent, unrecognizably adult men inhabiting a different world.  Mary is no different and furthermore, she has witnessed her son’s tragic death which has left her scarred and bitter, with no patience for the men who encouraged his intransigence.

We know that after Jesus’ death, it took the disciples, with help from Paul, some years to make sense of his life and teaching.  Christian orthodoxy says that these men were inspired.  Toibin suggests that not all of their conclusions were based on the truth as Mary saw it.

Reviews of this book vary greatly depending on reviewers’ Christian beliefs.  The most critical don’t even acknowledge Toibin’s sensitivity and fine writing.  They do not mention the consistency of Mary’s voice, the urgent flow of the storytelling or the perception of the characters.  I would like to hear more discussion about Marcus, a cousin of Mary’s who seeks her out in order to betray her.  To me, this is an unbelievable scenario which is not fully explained.

To those of us who have been over-exposed to sentimental Christmas cards and Great Master’s paintings in churches and museums, all of which serve to manipulate Mary into a model of female behaviour according to a patriarchal society, much of the thesis of this book is refreshing.  It is clever, original and well-written, but there is no doubt that Toibin takes delight in stirring up controversy and challenging the androcentrism of Christian teaching.

Death Comes to Pemberley

 

P.D. James

 

What an amazing woman is P.D. James.  She was born in 1920, the same year as my mother, and here she is, still writing international bestsellers.  This book was recommended to me by a friend, and when I saw it in the boutique of the local hospital auxiliary for $3.00, I snapped it up.  The next day I came down with a miserable winter cold, went to bed and read Death Comes to Pemberley in a day!

Take yourself back to the day you read the last page of Pride and Prejudice and remember all your hopes and worries for your favourite characters.  Did Mr. Darcy live up to expectations?  Did the vapid Mr. Bingley really make Jane happy?  What about Lydia and Mr. Wickham's further adventures?  Surely their elopement would be followed by other colourful adventures.

In Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James has given us the answer to all our questions and tossed in a murder mystery, of course.  All the mannerisms and tedious niceties of early 19th century society are recreated in Jane Austen style.  The tone of Pride and Prejudice lives on, as does the slow pace, however the plot driver is not the acquisition of suitable husbands but the solution of a mystery.  The action moves from the salons to the saloons and gives us a peek at nineteenth century justice.

Much of the action takes place in the dark and menacing woods of Mr. Darcy's Pemberley estate.  A body is found there, and the infamous Mr. Wickham, a sure troublemaker, seems to be responsible for the death.  Servant girls claim that there have been mysterious visitors to the woods, and a secluded cottage there, the site of the suicide of a Darcy ancestor, is now inhabited by an unwed mother and her terminally ill brother.

Clues are scattered and eventually reassembled to form a satisfactory conclusion to the mystery, and we have the pleasure of following our favourite characters through an exciting interlude in their domestic humdrum.  Indeed, Misters Bingley and Darcy have proved to be satisfactory husbands, the nurseries are full of the pitter-patter, and Elizabeth admits to enjoying her great wealth.  In fact, we feel considerable sympathy for these families so burdened by their great estates that they must spend their lives looking after their inheritances and their servants, giving traditional balls and fulfilling expectations.  Noblesse Oblige!

The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy

By J.K. Rowlings

 

As I began to read this book, I found myself searching for the author of Harry Potter.  When I finally resorted to a crib list to keep track of the multitude of characters, I missed the accessible writer who has led millions of children to enjoy reading with her easily-followed plots.  And as I encountered a cast of unlikeable people, I missed the sympathetic, easy-to-like Harry, Ron and Hermione.   Is  J.K. Rowling really a mean-spirited woman who can tell us nothing but nasty secrets about her cast of characters assembled in a seemingly idyllic English village with the Black Cannon Pub and the ancient church grouped around the village square?  Is she on a vendetta to destroy a stereotype?  Is she tired of being nice?  Is this the real her? 

Nevertheless, I kept reading because Rowling is a master storyteller and a skillful writer. And gradually I discovered the familiar author. 

She is there with the children in the village, much more compelling characters than the adults.  She is saying that without magic, this could have been the life of the orphaned Harry Potter.  She is saying that in real life, if children are not adequately loved and nurtured, challenged and supported, they can get into big trouble.  She is saying that children can be horrible to each other, but they can also be a support and provide personal growth. 

As the plot grew ever more sprawling and the many characters grew ever more complex, I began to wonder how Rawlings was ever going to bring her tale to a conclusion.  And then I discovered the author of Harry Potter again.  Except that the exciting nail-biters which ended the children's books sounded melodramatic in this book for adults.  Not that I don't like melodrama.  I was on the edge of my chair as I read the concluding chapters of this book. Once again, the concluding events in the plot surrounding the children rang true.  Their paths were leading to disaster, and it would take a momentous event to be a wake-up call to the adults who were to blame in avoiding serious issues with their children.  But the rip-roaring drunk of a party with all proprieties broken, while fun to read, was too obviously a wrap-up event for the miscellaneous sub-plots from which Rowlings needed to extricate herself. 

The adults are not entirely unsympathetic.  Rowlings cleverly ties the adult and child plots together at the end when several of the adult characters pass by little Robbie who is lost, dirty and crying.  Lest anyone doubt the theme of the book, it is here with these self-absorbed adults ignoring the needs of the child and refusing to acknowledge that all children are their responsibility.  But guilt and compunction do visit these adults after Robbie's death and we hope that the village will be a kinder, less self-satisfied place after the horrifying ending of the book. 

Read this book.  You will enjoy it, and you will find yourself thinking about its theme long after you are finished.  But it takes some persistence to get into it and some sang-froid to follow the affairs of the variously unlikeable adults who people its pages.

                                                                                                                                    Esther