Heroic
poses
Peter
Pierce
Tom
Keneally
The Widow and Her Hero
Doubleday, $49.95 hb, 297 pp, 1864711011
In
September 1943, seventeen commandos of Z Special Force, led by
Lieutenant Commander Ivan Lyon, attacked and sank with limpet
mines seven ships in the Singapore harbour. A year later, in October
1944, when the Pacific War had only months to run, a repeat performance
failed and all those involved were either killed in action or
executed by the Japanese. Though these events provide the basis
for Tom Keneally’s latest novel, The Widow and Her Hero,
he insists that it is ‘not meant to be a roman-à-clef
of those times and characters’. Rather, he is concerned with
the motives and the ‘inner souls’ of the people whom
he has invented.
They are set against Keneally’s favourite fictional background:
the battlefields and homefronts of World War II, the conflict
that shadowed his childhood. This was the temporal setting of
his second novel, The Fear (1965), of Season in Purgatory
(1976) and An Angel in Australia (2002) among others. And
that is not to count the two novels that Keneally published pseudonymously,
as ‘William Coyle’. In this latest work he investigates,
as he has before, how domestic society is transformed by its accommodations
to war. He depicts the lives of anxious wives and of those who
became war widows (‘a whole sub-class of women in the world,
invisible except to each other’), of bureaucrats, of servicemen
waiting their next call to duty.
The novel opens jerkily, as if it is a reverie that has been interrupted,
with names that need connecting: Leo, Hidaka, Reformatory Road.
Captain Leo Waterhouse is one of the title characters. The narrator
is the other. She is Grace Waterhouse, now an octogenarian who,
while she reflected that ‘I knew in general terms that I
was marrying a hero’, has become increasingly pensive, if
not altogether sceptical, about what heroism means and does to
men. Hidaka, also still alive, was a translator at the show trial
of the survivors of the operation called Memarang. Reformatory
Road was the site of their execution, one of the many such scenes
that Keneally’s fiction has to show, from Halloran’s
in Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), to Jimmie’s in The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), to Joan of Arc’s in
Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974). Keneally’s imagination
has been drawn to these episodes of formal brutality and to the
lives that so abruptly end.
If he disclaims this book as a fictionalised version of the Singapore
raids, Keneally has been as scrupulous as always in his historical
novels. His sources are numerous, his research painstaking. However,
the question of sources is vital in a different, although related
way in The Widow and Her Hero. Grace’s narrative draws
on many sources that are disclosed to us gradually and in the
order, with long delays, that they come to her attention. Journals
of his time in training come to her from Leo. She is also informed
by the investigations of Mark Lydon, to whose book The Sea
Otters (1968) Keneally gives the publisher Cassell, his own
in this period, at the beginning of his career. (Keneally has
in mind his own primary source, Ronald McKie’s The Heroes,
1960). From her own part in these events, and from varied testaments,
Grace shapes a story that she had originally intended for her
granddaughter and great-granddaughters, but she finds that ‘it
grows to have a vaguer, more general audience’. Latest in
Keneally’s long line of characters who are authors (compare
the high quotient in another serious ‘action’ novelist,
Ernest Hemingway), Grace is one of his pithiest: ‘yearning
suited the times’, she tells us, ‘widowhood was my education’.
Compared with the derring-do of heroes, Grace reckons that ‘it’s
longing and misery that are three-dimensional’. In this she
has company: Dotty Mortmain, whose husband will go on both expeditions
with Leo, and two other widows with whom she will reluctantly
trek to cheerless Canberra after the war, to discover why there
were no medals for their lost heroes. Now Keneally makes a return
of his own, to the setting of another of his novels of World War
II, The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980).
The depiction of Grace in her role as narrator is one of Keneally’s
subtlest portrayals, an exercise in craft that compels admiration.
For if the life of the hero in action is unproblematic, even if
it might be fatal – ‘each detonation enlarged their
legend’ – the life of the woman left behind with a cherished
store of memories is not. As one new revelation gradually follows
another (for instance the ‘suicide letter’ from one
who feels that he might have been ‘the last war criminal’),
Grace is visited by ‘the old fear that something new might
emerge which must be borne, something dangerous to the honour
of Leo’s ghost and something perilous to me’. That is,
Grace does not want to know what Keneally the novelist has to
make her tell us. The last of these revelations will make her
feel as if her soul was ‘breaking out in hives’. The
men who participated in these adventures are drawn – by contrast
with Grace – with a risky but deliberate two-dimensionality
by Keneally. It is as though desperate action will confine as
much as it expresses character. Leo is patently decent, loyal,
handsome, even though he bears a close resemblance to none other
than Errol Flynn (‘He’s a Tasmanian, you know’).
Leo’s sorrow is for his father, captured by the Japanese
in the Solomons; killed when his prison ship was torpedoed by
an American submarine. Keneally’s use of this detail suddenly
illuminates a whole canvas of war. More allied prisoners died
in this fashion than on the Burma railway. The Boss of the raiders
is Charlie Doucette, who fancies him-self as ‘a pirate chieftain’,
but who is, to Dotty Mortmain, ‘that Irish chancer’,
‘a madman born out of his time’. The minor parts are
filled in with respectful care, but not at length. It is, after
all, with the consequences of the raids that Grace’s story
is concerned.
Yet it must also involve itself with the days and workings of
the war. Keneally presents an intriguing account of inter-service
and international rivalry. Doucette is especially resentful of
the American colonel Jesse Creed, whom he believes is trying to
stall the mission. The theory advanced is that the dead hand behind
this is General MacArthur’s, his motive resistance to the
re-establishment of British imperium in the Asian territories
taken from it by the Japanese. Creed will at last come back to
Australia with another story of how the lives of individuals are
sacrificed to larger designs, thus enraging Grace, but by now
hardly surprising her: ‘Someone as precious and complex as
Leo written off by people in temperate, secure Melbourne.’
Heading into action, far from the southern capital, Doucette carries
with him a copy of Chapman’s translation of Homer’s
Odyssey (Keats valued this so much that it gener-ated his
first significant poem). The book, the choice, is emblematic of
the dash for adventure, the flight from domestic life. In fact,
Doucette had believed his wife and step-son dead. When they are
declared alive, his telling reaction is to feel that he has not
been sufficiently moved. Odysseus left home for a final adventure.
Doucette will not have been surprised by how his own days end.
The feckless, heroic traveller’s story of Odysseus is in
Grace’s mind on the last page of this novel. She mocks such
slogans as King and Country, Banzai and the rest, as ‘mere
trellises upon which men uncertain of their weakness grow their
peculiar and imperfect intentions’. The words stumble a little,
as if from an old anger. A fresh flood of feeling produced one
of the novel’s sharpest images, when Grace uses a shocking
verb to describe a Canberra minister’s office: ‘heartened
with pictures of fighter planes and bombers.’ Arriving at
her own final words, Grace declares that she had not wanted a
hero, to whom a woman can never truly be married, for ‘the
heroic pose is not destined for ultimate domesticity’. Nor
does the hero, one might add, ever truly come home. But Leo Waterhouse’s
last thoughts end The Widow and Her Hero. They recall those
that Keneally gave to Corporal Halloran in Bring Larks and Heroes,
a work four decades ago in time but so near to this one in the
shocking and solemn beauty of its conclusion.
Peter
Pierce is currently editing The Cambridge History of Australian
Literature.
AUSTRALIAN
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