Best known for his 1982 Booker Prize winning Schindler’s Ark (made into the film Schindler’s List), Thomas Keneally turns his attention once again to World War II in his latest novel, The Widow and Her Hero. In his Author’s Note preceding the narrative, Keneally explains some of the sources of his historic fiction, which chronicles the heroic actions of some British and Australian military personnel against the Japanese in Singapore in 1943.
Some 60 years after the death of her husband, Leo (one of the heroes), Grace Waterhouse narrates these events. Different perspectives from Grace and from Leo’s diaries examine our complicated notions of heroism. Although the basic story seems straightforward enough with Leo and his group attaching mines to Japanese ships, the plot becomes much more complex in Keneally’s hands. Two narrative pages preceding the first chapter highlight the author’s divergence from straightforward chronology, the end preceding the beginning. “Leo. His last consciousness is written not on toilet paper supplied by Hidaka but on the yellow ether there, in Reformatory Road.” This disorienting opening doesn’t become clear until 250 pages later when we learn the details of Leo’s torture and beheading by the Japanese. As the novel speculates on the nature of heroism and antiheroism, reader and narrator share in a sense of disorientation. Leo’s description of his final days, written on prison toilet paper, is interspersed with his wife’s interpretation of those horrific events. Imagining that moment of “yellow ether” after the passage of more than a half-century, Grace writes about Leo’s last consciousness. “He knows something enormous has fallen on his neck, but mercifully not much more, no focus, no subtle thought.” Focus and subtle thought belong to Grace, who wonders whether he remembered the hymn from their wedding and if he remembered where he was.
Instead of the enemy swordsmen being “knights of the blade,” the Japanese executioners are clumsy butchers. The final words of this introduction belong to George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, a play performed by the prisoners: “All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I could take my head out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it.” On the one hand, Leo and his fellow prisoners die heroically; on the other hand, their actions may also be viewed as foolhardy adventurism.
The first chapter begins on a less grim note with Grace’s rumination on heroism: “I knew in general terms that I was marrying a hero.” What the specifics of those general terms are remains to be seen. “The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero’s wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt or to understate her demands.” In retrospect, Leo’s burden lies more heavily on Grace: “With the confidence of near-on nine decades I can talk about doubt now. I would at least ask, what is so precious about the heroic impulse?”
Asking that question lends weight to the novel, but the narrative thrust derives from the actions and attacks of the heroes at war. Leo Waterhouse resembles Errol Flynn, which adds to Grace’s feelings of attraction to him. She works in Canberra as a secretary for the Department of Navy, while he works for the IRD, the Independent Reconnaissance Department. During his training and on his missions, Leo works with an Irishman, Charlie “The Boss” Doucette, and Rufus Mortmain (whose wife, Dotty, befriends Grace). Their first mission, called Cornflakes, is highly successful, since they manage to mine and blow up a number of Japanese ships harboured in Singapore. The details of attaching the limpets to ships are intriguing. Upon their return, they are treated like heroes in Sydney and Melbourne, yet the details are not publicised for fear of Japanese retaliation.
So successful is this first mission that Doucette tries his luck again, but the second mission is doomed. The second half of Keneally’s book reconstructs the events surrounding their deaths from multiple sources, as Grace has to readjust her understanding of her husband’s tragic fate according to each new report. The Japanese interpreter, Hidaka, visits Grace and offers his account of the trial, imprisonment, torture, and beheading of the prisoners. Later still, ninety-two-year-old Jesse Creed, the American general who had tried to support Doucette’s mission with submarines, visits Grace and apologises for not having done more to rescue her husband and his team.
At times, the alternating narrative between Grace’s insights and Leo’s account of his incarceration (written on toilet paper and printed in italics in the text) can be disconcerting. We learn a great deal about military history in the South China Sea during World II; Keneally’s novel is also filled with literary allusions. The prisoners perform Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple, as a means of keeping up their morale. In the play, Dick Dudgeon embraces execution in place of another man, the Reverend Anderson, in New Hampshire in 1777. Leo, Doucette, and the other prisoners literally re-enact the drama in the belief that they are sacrificing their lives for the sake of some innocent Malays, who have been wrongfully accused of carrying out the earlier Cornflakes raids. Shaw’s introductory essay to the play, “On Diabolonian Ethics”, explains to his critics the heroic act: “The saving of life at the risk of the saver’s own is not a common thing; but populations are so vast that even the most uncommon things are recorded once a week or oftener.” After he points out the cases of policemen or firemen who receive a medal for their deeds, he poses a more cynical question: “Has he ever seen it added that the saved was the husband of the woman the saver loved, or was that woman herself, or was ever known to the saver as much as by sight? Never. When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder columns; and there we are rarely disappointed.”
To reinforce this didactic conclusion, Grace ruminates on her entire life: “But enough. Enough now.” She gazes out of her window “to the Pacific which connects us to all peoples and all cultures. There is an absolute purity out there that transcends all slogans.” She muses on uncertainties, imperfections, and heroism: “I didn’t want a hero. A person is never married to a hero-the heroic pose is not designed for ultimate domesticity. Ulysses on his return found not a wife to charm but suitors to fight. Nothing is learned, and everything is learned.” Connecting us to many peoples and cultures, Thomas Keneally’s fiction teaches us almost everything.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)
