FictionFor six decades, Grace Waterhouse, now in her late eighties, has been haunted by recollections of a short but happy marriage, which ended when her husband, Leo, a captain of a secretive commando force, was executed by Japanese soldiers in the second World War.
A moderately successful poet and a teacher, Grace has remarried and found a kind of redemption in parenthood, but troublingly unanswered questions about her first husband's death have proven impossible to banish. This negotiation with the past provides the framework of Thomas Keneally's latest novel, a compelling and deeply persuasive meditation on the moral ambiguities of heroism.
Leo's mercurial one-time superior, an Irish-born major, Charlie Doucette, boasts of how his ancestors put down rebellions in Ireland. Soldiering seems a part of Doucette's DNA. It is impossible to imagine him in peacetime. Around him is an elite force of young men in his thrall, Grace's husband among them. Disguised as fishermen, they embark on a fantastically dangerous mission into enemy waters to bomb Japanese shipping at Singapore.
Some of the novel's most haunting passages are set on this journey, during which the men kill time by storytelling. Explicitly Homeric parallels are offered. There are only three books on board, one of which is the Odyssey. (The others are a pornographic novel and Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ.) Soon these Ozzie Argonauts themselves will be the stuff of legend, their deeds becoming part of a self-editing folk memory, but for Keneally such a fate is packed with ambivalence. Legends inspire wars, are somehow part of war's language, and are needed, it is suggested, for the cruelty of war to become possible. It is interesting to see such a gifted writer of fiction so publicly mistrust the fictional.
THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT of this fine novel is its tact. While it builds into a powerful meditation on the pitilessness of war, it is focused so unerringly on the lives of its characters that the easy political stances that sometimes unbalance the literature of warfare are entirely and happily absent. Keneally writes a prose of Coetzeean clarity and poise. Grace's first-person voice is both convincing and quietly captivating, but the tone of the book is made darker and stranger by the inclusion of passages told by Leo, and by others, with the urgency of present tense. There is a tension between remembered happenings and events being lived. Thus the book embodies the unease it is about.
Admirers of his previous novels will recognise some familiar preoccupations: the impact of public histories on private morality; the conflicting demands of different sorts of responsibility. If Schindler's Ark was a novel about terrible choices, so too is this book, in its way. And Keneally's deft mixing of genres works brilliantly, as does his occasional subverting of chronology. This is a page-turner of a thriller as well as an affecting (and very sexy) love story, ingeniously constructed, carefully weighted, so that you absorb whatever it has to say about war through a kind of unnoticed osmosis. The small solidarities between its women are beautifully written, as are the portraits of its slippery and unctuous politicians, who appear to regard the deaths of their nation's youth with an almost celestial indifference.
MORE BROADLY, AND more daringly, the novel investigates the processes by which public heroes are constructed. As such, it is not a war novel in the narrowly documentary sense but a book about versions of masculinity. "What is so precious about the heroic impulse?" Grace asks. "Why do ordinary lusty boys love it better in the end than lust itself, and better than love?" Something in maleness or rather manliness is being examined here, and the concern brings a deeply involving edginess to the writing. Keneally's worldview is complex and the morality of his characters is murky. There is none of Wilfred Owen's sometimes anaesthetising notion of soldiers as always entirely innocent victims. Keneally's combatants are often reckless, half in love with death. It is as though they want to prove something other than the correctness of a cause, to atone for some private failing, imagined or real, or to assuage some personal doubt. And the effect on the women around them is wrenchingly described. These war-brides and sweethearts have been persuaded by authority that their hope needs to be sacrificed, surrendered. "For what?" one woman asks, in this novel's central question, all the more powerful for never being answered explicitly.
This is a timely and disquieting book from a master storyteller. Like all great historical novels it reveals as much about the time of its making as it does about the era in which it is set. In the world of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, where the hangman and the torturer appear on the nightly news, Keneally's novel is a reminder of the corrosive sordor of wartime, then, now, and in the future. But it also something more: a novel of beauty and faith. That it manages to find hope anywhere in the moral wreckage it maps is a kind of quiet marvel.
Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea is published in paperback by Vintage. His next novel, Redemption Falls, will be published by Harvill Secker in May
The Widow and Her Hero By Thomas Keneally Sceptre, 266pp. £16.99