Published by Text
Publishing
RRP $37.00
Review by Maggie Rainey-Smith
Arthur Wheeler, to
quote the back blurb of this novel “is a guard in a camp for enemy aliens in
country Victoria during World War Two.
Stanley is a young Japanese man interned in the camp, and Arthur cannot
stop thinking about him.”
And, I can’t stop
thinking about this novel. It is
achingly sad and exquisitely explicit, written in the first person, from
Arthur’s point of view about his obsession with Stanley. There are so many interesting aspects to
this beautiful story. First and
foremost it is about repressed desire and too the era and environment in which
this occurs. Cory Taylor had me
believing she was Arthur, that I was reading a personal memoir and I had to
keep checking that yes, Cory is a woman writer.
Arthur is so well drawn, as a
young boy, unaware of his own sexuality, growing up in the 1930’s and 40’s in a
conservative household with a brutal father, who is a country policeman, and a
mean drunk. He forms an innocent but formatively
influential relationship with his young neighbour Bill who has just returned
from London. Bill is a keen
photographer and Arthur becomes interested in design and fashion and when he
suggests a career along these lines, his father says ‘Over my dead body’. The friendship ends when Arthur’s father
leaves a note in Bill’s letterbox.
This is really just the
background to Arthur, but the key story is his initial infatuation with Stanley
that becomes a repressed desire that haunts him for the rest of his life. Arthur ends up as a guard in the camp where
Stanley and his Japanese family are interned during the Second World War. Stanley’s family were circus performers and
Stanley has spent much of his childhood in America during their performance tours. He is
determined when the war ends, to go and live in America Both Arthur and Stanley are still young men,
practically still boys. They play tennis
together and Stanley always has the upper hand in all their encounters. Arthur
is deeply disturbed by Stanley’s beauty and otherness, his ‘Orientalism’ and
they form a friendship, one in which Stanley understands more profoundly than
Arthur, the nature of Arthur’s obsession.
There are many layers to this
novel. One is the story of Arthur and
Stanley and Arthur’s repressed sexuality, a love story. Another is the story of the interned
Japanese prisoners, the conditions under which they are held; their day to day
activities, how they responded to the camp and their relationship with their
captors. These scenes are sensitively
drawn and both the Japanese and the Australian characters are portrayed in
complex, realistic detail, rather than broad brushstroke stereotypes. Many of the Japanese prisoners do not want
to believe it when the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. A small group of them are in denial and
still believe Japan will win the war.
It is utterly heartbreaking when they finally accept their fate. The Japanese prisoners are shipped back to
Japan, most of them wanting to stay in Australia, or in Stanley’s case, to go
to America.
I was gripped for the entire
novel, held by the love story but fascinated too by the historical detail and
the rendering of characters caught in a particular time in history, the
conventions and attitudes that influenced them, their humanity so
empathetically drawn.
Arthur marries May who is
pregnant with his child, in spite of his desire for Stanley and even May seems
to understand who he is, but is convinced through her willpower and love for
Arthur, that she can make him happy. When the war ends, and the camp disperses,
Arthur tries to make a go of his marriage but fails. He abandons his wife and child and tries to
forge a new life, even marrying again twice, but his obsession with Stanley
remains with him.
Eventually, when it is too late
perhaps, Arthur decides to go to Japan to try and find Stanley. It is so interesting to see him as a mature
adult encountering the modernity of Tokyo, finally meeting up with Stanley and
all that this represents. The
denouement of any novel is such a critical moment in a piece of writing and
often the very best novels fail in the aftermath to fully satisfy, but this
novel sustains right to the very end.
It had me thinking too, about 21st
century Australia in contrast to the novel’s early setting during the Second
World War. I wonder if still in the
backblocks, the more provincial outlying areas, whether there are still Arthurs
out there, battling with their identity in the new (but now no longer new)
country. The conventions and
conservatism that drove Patrick White to London... and more recently, the overt
misogyny around Julia Gillard. Or is this story, both an old and a modern story
– the coming to terms with sexuality and identity, no matter how modern we are,
a unique and sometimes terrifying terrain to traverse, depending on your
milieu, your upbringing and your desires and simply a personal journey rather
than a political one.
About the reviewer:
Maggie Rainey-Smith is a Wellington writer and regular reviewer on Beattie's Book Blog. She is also Chair of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors.
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