Empress of Asia: A Novel [Hardcover]

The beginning of this book captivated me. I thought I was starting a love story - a book about a once upon a time love...the kind of story that I hear from my grandma and others of the WWII generation. Two people meet in a world that is upside down and they just KNOW they are meant together. And many MANY years later, one loses the other and is unsure how to continue on alone.

I'm not sure why I thought that...but I was wrong. The first chapter was like that as Harry Winslow prepares for and then loses his wife Lily. The love and heartache are there - the sense of bewilderment of an old man who doesn't know how to go on. And then we go back in time to pre-World War II Canada with Harry, a young man who is ready to embark on just about any adventure that will get his life started. We then spend the next 7/8 of the book as he heads for the sea, meets Lily, endures one of the first battles with the Japanese, and is then captured and taken to a POW camp.

I do not mean to make light of or diminish the importance of Harry's experiences during the war. I just glimpsed such a sense of deep feeling in the modern day Harry that I didn't get even during the most gut wrenching war scenes that I kept turning the pages faster and faster, hoping we'd either jump to modern day for at least a scene. But, it was not to be.

During his war years, Harry does maintain a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the absurd, and is astonished along with the reader as we see some of the unbelievable things that happen during wartime. Some parts of the book, too, were heartbreaking, or would be if I felt more like Harry was experiencing them as well, instead of merely noting them.

FINALLY, in the last chapter(s) of the book, we return to modern day Harry as he is faced with a part of his wife he never knew, an aspect of her life he was blind to. And here, the emotion of an old man who has done and seen too much, comes through with full force.

"The one thought that's been creeping in is that I haven't lost you quite as much as I'd thought I had. I haven't lost you because as it turns out the you that I lost wasn't a real person. A guy can't have lost what didn't exist in the first place, right? No, she did exist, but I only saw half."

Maybe because he saw so much of the inexplicable during the war, he stopped seeing things he couldn't understand once he'd survived the war. The war changed him dramatically, taking away his desire for travel, for new experiences, for adventure. He just wanted his wife - and only the version of the wife he remembered from the day they'd met.

In the end, Harry is faced with the fact that he didn't really know his wife. The reader is faced with the fact that while we know many things that took place in Harry's life during his youth, we don't really know Harry. Which is a shame.

"Empress of Asia" begins with protagonist, Harry Winslow, describing life as "bursts of activity that happen so quickly that we can't even tell exactly what's happening."

In a sense, this story is Harry's description of his own life's "bursts of activity". Beginning in the late 1930's, Harry's adult life begins when he leaves home to work on boats. As World War II unfolds, Harry is inadvertently drawn eastward and into the heart of the Japanese war in and around Singapore. It is an exciting couple of years for an otherwise mild-mannered, unambitious man, who is far more motivated by really great jazz than political idealism and freedom from fascism.

Shortly before she dies, at the very beginning of the book, Harry's wife Lily exhorts Harry to travel to Thailand in search of a long lost friend from the war. The book's story unfolds as Harry recollects these defining wartime years of his life.

Harry is masterfully drawn as a painfully short-sighted Everyman drawn into extraordinary events. Encompassing an approximately seven-year stretch of time from about 1938 to 1945, it is primarily through the self-determination and ambition of others, that Harry goes where he goes and does what he does. Over and over, he is the hapless beneficiary of the ambition, courage, and cleverness of other people.

The concluding section of the book finds the elderly Harry in Thailand following the trail of crumbs Lily left for him to find his old friend. What he untimately discovers rattles everything he thought about his life since the war. Despite his dramatic time in Asia, before and after, because of fear and prejudices, he has lived a limited, shuttered life. Thailand wakes him up.

Had I a few less interruptions by my four kids, I would have gotten through "Empress of Asia" in two days instead of three. I stayed up late and woke up early to get in a few extra pages. Even days after finishing, I still have a palpable sense of the Malay Peninsula during World War II; that lesser known WWII arena of exotic heat, bugs, landscape, and people.

"Empress of Asia" was originally published in Canada in 2006; March 2008 will be its debut in the United States. Schroeder is a Canadian poet of some repute, and as a reader, it is clear to me that he has a poet's ear for the cadence of narrative and dialogue. His story flows indelibly from page to page - it is a hard book to put down and pick up, not because the reading is difficult (it isn't), but because it is so utterly transporting. Schroeder's subtextual use of dialogue and foreign dialects is masterful. (Note: Though the book doesn't contain a glossary, there is a very good one on Schroeder's website that is worth referencing.) Schoeder's characters are refreshingly multifaceted - all have an authentic balance of strengths and weaknesses.

Towards the end of the book, Harry discovers bowls of live snakes and turtles for sale in a Thai market, and makes this telling observation about the will to survive: "Of course the snakes just slither around in the bottom but.... the turtles are stacked one on top of the other and in the fifteen seconds that I'm watching one of them drags himself to the top and flips onto the pavement!.... [I]f they're all going to end up in the soup anyway, why should the [turtles] on the bottom give two shakes if the ones on top have a little more ambition? In the meantime the snakes just lay there wondering which minute is going to be their last, so which bowl would you rather have been in?"

Harry appears to be much more like one of the snakes, waiting passively along through events, but there are numerous ambitious turtles with whom he finds himself entangled and carried along, and, in the end, he survives. As the reader, I am left to wonder, of the snake and turtle, which am I?

I definitely recommend "Empress of Asia".

i looked forward to this book because my father worked for the owners of the empress of asia and was also 6 years as a seaforth in this war.after the war he returned to the canadian pacific steamships. i was not disapointed upon reading it. men returning from world war 2 did not talk much about their experiences. this book puts you in the midst of war. it was entertaining and informative about a time we had little personal information. so this book gave us that.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 6 reviews  3.7 out of 5 stars