We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“SHAME AND THE CAPTIVES” by Tom Keneally (Vintage Books / Random House $NZ39:99)
I must be
getting old. I can recall when Thomas Keneally novels came out with the name
“Thomas” on them. Now, apparently, he has re-branded himself as “Tom”.
I remember the racy fun his
earliest novels gave me in the 1970s. Those first ones that reflected,
ironically and half-affectionately, his Australian Catholic background and
years as a seminarian (The Place at
Whitton, Three Cheers for the
Paraclete). That weird surrealist fantasy A Dutiful Daughter. Then the ones in which he hit his forte with reconstructions
of history from the relatively recent past – The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (mistreatment of Aborigines in 19th
century Australia); Gossip from the
Forest (skulduggery surrounding the signing of the armistice at the end of
the First World War); A Victim of the
Aurora (early 20th century polar exploration); Season in Purgatory (Tito’s partisans in
Yugoslavia in the Second World War) and later the Booker Prize winner Schindler’s Ark, better known by its
American (and film) title as Schindler’s
List. But the last Keneally novel I read was The Playmaker, written in the late 1980s in time for the 200th
anniversary of the first British settlement of Australia, and a very effective
evocation of the early penal colony.
I know the man has been prolific
(30 novels and nearly 20 works of non-fiction, according to the list given in
his latest novel), but I wondered if his work would still engage me as much as
it used to do.
So, for the first time in about
twenty years, I picked up a new Keneally novel, Shame and the Captives. It is clearly in line of descent with the
old Keneally, being an historical novel of the recent past. But it is somehow
more mellow, more reflective, more philosophical and ruminative than the old
one-two historical punching you used to get in something as bitterly satirical
as Gossip from the Forest.
Shame and the Captives is based
on the “Cowra outbreak”. In historical fact, this took place in August 1944,
about 18 months after the “Featherston riot” in New Zealand (which Vincent
O’Sullivan commemorated in his play Shuriken).
It was a mass breakout by Japanese prisoners from a POW camp in rural New South
Wales. 545 Japanese servicemen attempted to escape. 231 of them were killed as
they rushed the wire and tried to overwhelm the garrison guarding them. Four
Australian soldiers were also killed. About 300 Japanese disappeared into the
bush, but they all either surrendered or were rounded up within the next couple
of weeks, and were returned to captivity. The Australians noted that many
Japanese committed suicide at the time of the outbreak, or begged to be killed
when they were re-captured. There was no question that the camp had been run
humanely and according to the Geneva Convention. The breakout was not provoked
by any mistreatment of the prisoners. But even at the time, the Australians
understood that the Japanese military code of honour said that it was shameful
to be a captive and that death was preferable to imprisonment. Many of the
Japanese, realizing that the war had gone against them, were hoping to be shot
by their captors rather than be returned to post-war Japan and face scorn for
having been captured.
As far as the external events of
the outbreak are concerned, Keneally’s novel follows them very closely, right down
to the fate of the two squaddies who tried to man the camp’s machine-gun
against the rioting Japanese. There is very, very careful scene-setting, with the
novel moving at a leisurely pace and divided into two parts, Spring 1943 and
Autumn 1944. Yet while the externals of the story are historical, the inner
worlds of the characters depend on the novelist’s imagination and intuition.
All characters have fictitious names and the small town of Cowra has been
retitled Gawell. Keneally is painfully careful in his preface (“Where the Tale
Comes From”) to separate his imagined characters from their historical
counterparts, especially as the novel implies some serious character defects in
senior officers guarding the compound.
The novel is as much concerned
with the mentality of Australians as with that of the prisoners. Indeed the
title Shame and the Captives has more
than one meaning. It is clear that the Australian characters are as imprisoned
by their circumstances as the Japanese. In effect, they too are captives and
they feel various shames.
Alice, for example, living with
her father-in-law (a local farmer), is married to a man who is a POW in
Austria. At first she thinks her own kindly behaviour to Axis prisoners in
Australia is some sort of guarantee that her husband will be treated well. The
same is true of the POW camp’s Major Suttor, whose son has been captured by the
Japanese. He is constantly worried that any reported mistreatment of his
inmates will be visited upon his son. Shame visits Major Suttor in an odd way.
He earns his living writing radio soap operas about an idealised Australian
family. He is aware of how different his scripts are from objective reality and
of how much he has surrendered to slick commercialism, after having started out
as a serious novelist. His superior Colonel Abercare has the shame of an
adulterous affair in his past, which has poisoned his relationship with his
wife. (The wife’s being a Catholic allows Keneally to revisit some of his Catholic
background in scenes with the local priest). And where sexual shame is
concerned, there is the major matter of Alice indulging in an affair with the
Italian POW Giancarlo who has (like other Italian POWs) been allowed out of the
prison to work as a farm labourer. What is interesting here is the way Keneally
shows the wife as, in effect, exploiting the Italian who, for all his sexual
attractiveness, is not in a position to resist (or complain) about her
advances. Sexual hunger - given the absence of Alice’s husband - is part of the
situation, but on a more subtle level it is clear that Alice, the “free” woman,
has succumbed to the temptation of having power over somebody. It is implied
that Giancarlo comes to feel more imprisoned by her attentions than he felt
when he was behind the wire.
Keneally’s characters are
rounded. They are not caricatures. He does not overdo references to racist
attitudes of the times, or to the exaggerated fears that the outbreak
generated, although these are referenced.
To dump all my criticisms in one
spot, however, I do note the odd lapse into melodrama, and a few moments of
somewhat stagey dialogue, as when Colonel Abercare’s aggrieved wife says:
“I should
abominate the betrayal, Ewen….And by God I do! But there’s the damage to my
vanity too – to my standing. It compounds everything. It shouldn’t, since these
are fatuous opinions. But they’ve left their mark. It’s the pressure of them,
all around, from every direction.” (p.119)
I could also wag my finger at the
rather too-neat way (in terms of articulating the novel’s themes) that Alice is
eventually dismissed from the story.
With regard to the novel’s
exploration of the Japanese prisoners’ shame, Keneally dramatizes the
fanaticism in the Japanese military code in the person of the fighter pilot
Tengen, who incites his fellow inmates to strive for honourable death in their
attempted “escape”. But Keneally’s interpretation of the outbreak is not
monocausal. There are also the frustrations of homo-eroticism in an all-male
prison environment, where physical violence between prisoners often masks
sexual attraction. Tengen has a “utilitarian
affair” (p.146) with a female impersonator. Wrestling contests become the
site of dominance displays, with the winner taking as his reward the sexual
submission of the defeated. And there is a very strange undertow to Tengen’s
desire for mass self-immolation. Deep down, he is aware that the world is
changing and the warrior code is already in the process of being rejected by
many Japanese. There is at least one Christian among the Japanese prisoners,
who rejects suicide on principle. More cuttingly, there is Tengen’s comrade Aoki,
who says:
“even I
feel the world beyond here is changing, and that under their flesh men’s
opinions might be changing too. In this matter, I can speak only for myself. I
can address only my own obligation. A coerced sacrifice isn’t worth a lot here.
A voluntary one is a different matter.” (p.233)
This may be part of what is
really haunting the more fanatical warrior Tengen – the unwilling acknowledgement
that, having encountered the non-Japanese world, the warrior code of sacrifice
at any cost is becoming faintly ridiculous. When they are rounded up, many
escapees feel “stuck unexpectedly again
with the chronic disorder of survival”. (p.308) They would rather be dead.
Even so, as Shame and the Captives
tells it, there is a certain “enforced ceremony” to the outbreak, as if the
escapees are trying to convince themselves of values which they are really
beginning to question.
This is a well-conducted
mainstream novel, with a psychologically-convincing cast of characters and a
strong sense of historical reality.
He may be more reflective than of
yore, but Keneally stills knows how to tell a story for grown-ups.
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