Thomas Keneally and the myths of the Second World War

Thomas Keneally
THE WIDOW AND HER HERO
266pp. Sceptre. £16.99.
978 0 340 82527 3

In 1994, on Merapas Island, just south-east of Singapore, the bodies of two Allied soldiers were found. The two men had died almost fifty years earlier, on November 4, 1944, their lives lost fighting off a task force of Japanese soldiers. Sergeant Colin Cameron and Sub-Lieutenant James Riggs, both of whom were twenty-one at the time of their deaths, are part of an unfinished final chapter in the story of the Second World War’s least-known and most audacious operation, Operation Rimau.

Modelled on the earlier and more successful Operation Jaywick, Rimau sent a small force of Allied commandos, equipped with limpet mines and miniature submersibles, to commandeer a Malay junk and attempt to infiltrate Singapore Harbour. If it had been successful, Rimau might well have struck a powerful psychological and strategic blow against the Japanese. But the mission came unstuck a little more than an hour before it was due to begin. Just outside the entrance to the harbour, a coastal patrol vessel crewed by the Malay police approached the commandeered junk, presumably meaning to inspect it. If there had been crew members who spoke some of the local languages aboard the junk, it is just possible the encounter might not have been fatal to the mission, but when the patrol vessel approached, one of the commandos – probably a British officer who had been taken on board at the last moment – panicked and opened fire with his machine-gun. In the ensuing exchange, three of the patrol vessel’s crew of five were killed, and the other two escaped to raise the alarm.

Their cover compromised, the mission’s commander, the magnetic and unorthodox Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Lyon, ordered the junk scuttled, and its cargo of mini-submersibles, or “Sleeping Beauties”, destroyed. He then divided his force, sending most of them back to await the submarine that was to collect them from Merapas, while he and six others went ahead and infiltrated the harbour using collap-sible canoes. In the hours that followed, Lyon and his companions sank three enemy ships before being killed in action trying to make their escape. Meanwhile, the group who had been sent back to Merapas were drawn into a series of running battles with Japanese forces, who killed three more of the commandos and captured the remaining ten. Rimau did not end there. The ten captured men were transported back to Singapore, where, in the months that followed, they were brutally interrogated, repeatedly tortured and finally put on trial for espionage. They were beheaded in July 1945, barely a month before the Japanese surrender.

In its outline, and in particular the fact of the execution of the survivors so close to the war’s end, Rimau has much of the mythological glamour that shrouds such events: not so much tidying away the brutality of war as bathing it in the glow of doomed heroism. In this it resembles the increasingly free-floating Australian national myth of Gallipoli, for it celebrates the human tragedy of war while also forestalling the unsettling questions we might ask, not just about the events themselves but about the cost of the wider conflict generally.

It is this covering veil of nostalgia and patriotism that Thomas Keneally seeks to pierce in his new novel, The Widow and Her Hero, which takes a thinly fictionalized version of the events of Rimau and uses them as the basis for a larger exploration of the idea of heroism and the long-term effects of war on those left behind. At its centre is Leo Waterhouse, a young Australian officer attached to a group called the Independent Reconnaissance Department. During training for a mission to occupied Rabaul he is teamed with Keneally’s fictional version of Lyon, Major Charlie Doucette, one of the only remaining members of a regiment of Royal Ulster Fusiliers that was routed during the Fall of Singapore. A long-distance sailor, old Asia hand and one of the few who saw the chink in Singapore’s armour before the Japanese attack, Doucette cuts precisely the sort of figure other men find irresistible. “Men in the know shook their heads, laughed and felt better when his name came up.”

As the slight doubt raised by these words, and the deliberate – and deliberately bitter – irony of the title suggest, The Widow and Her Hero is not a novel which inhabits the perspective of “other men”. Instead, its words are those of Leo’s wife, Grace, for whom the legacies of her husband’s death are neither simple nor easily contained by the simplistic ideals of heroism which lie at the heart of the clubby adolescent world inhabited by Doucette and his kind. Perhaps appropriately, the account that Grace gives strains in several directions at once. Initially a means of bearing witness to Leo and what happened to him, in a document written for the benefit of Grace’s “somewhat bemused granddaughter, Rachel and for her daughters”, it grows in the writing to be something else, something larger, not just a message addressed “to a vaguer, more general audience”, but a work which, in its increasingly naked pain and grief, seeks to tear down the altar on which men like Leo are placed.

None of this is new territory for Thomas Keneally, who has long been interested not just in war and its many legacies, but also in the way individuals are overtaken and transformed by the processes of history. In the depiction of the experiences of Yugoslav partisans in the Second World War in Season in Purgatory (1976), in the fictional treatment of the Versailles negotiations in Gossip from the Forest (1975) and in his two best-known novels, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972) and Schindler’s Ark (1982), he has repeatedly displayed a striking and often troubling ability to portray the vulnerability of individual men faced with larger forces.

In her inability to resolve these contradictory impulses, Grace is one of Keneally’s more remarkable creations: a grieving widow driven by her conscience to deny the purpose of her husband’s life. Her mingled feelings of tenderness and bitterness are captured eloquently in the sometimes awkward phrasing of her narrative, which has a sharpness of observation that she cannot always control. As she reflects at one point, “it’s longing and misery that are three-dimensional”, an observation which might easily apply to any of the women who are left to reap the bitter harvest of male folly in Keneally’s fiction. In contrast to Grace, Leo is an oddly incomplete portrait. In part this is a function of his youth. “Leo Waterhouse was the most beautiful adult boy I have seen in my nearly ninety years of life on earth”, Grace writes, remembering him and his cousin Mel practising their newly acquired arts of combat; they tussle and fight, “both playful and serious”, in her parents’ backyard, and her recollection is made more poignant by the ordinariness of the oleander bush in which Mel ends up after one particular throw.

At a time when our images of war are mostly filtered through Hollywood, it is salutary to be reminded that the soldiers whose deaths gave us our wartime narratives of sacrifice were, for the most part, little more than boys. Bearing that fact in mind, as Grace requires us to, cannot help but make us imagine their deaths a little differently. It is also salutary, and chilling, to be reminded of the cynicism and bad faith of those to whose care these young men’s lives were entrusted. Not the Doucettes, though Grace admits she came to hate Leo’s commander well enough, but the politicians and the generals. In this, Keneally is happy to make use of many of the stereotypes which bedevil Australian thinking about its military history: Blamey the drunk, the priggish English, the self-interested and ultimately unreliable Americans. But alongside these stereotypes is another, more serious picture of the gulf between political rhetoric and grim reality. On a visit to Canberra after the war, Grace and several of her fellow widows visit the office of the Minister for Defence in search of some official recognition of the sacrifice their husbands have made. In a room where the walls are “heartened” by pictures of bombers and aircraft carriers, the Minister seeks to deflect their request. When Grace and the others will not be put off, he changes tack, insinuating that the men’s deaths may have been at their own hands. “Of course they had cyanide pills . . . . Did you know that?”, says the Minister, gravely informing Grace and her companions that their husbands’ deaths had been covered up because they had cracked under interrogation.

For Grace, writing more than half a century after Leo’s death, the issue is not his youth, nor even really his death, but the question of why he died. This question, once asked, cannot be contained. “What is so precious about the heroic impulse? Why do ordinary lusty boys love it better in the end than lust itself?” And behind this lies another, even more frightening, question. What was it for, in the end, all that pain, and all that death?

An unflinching clarity and moral purpose has long given shape and purpose to Keneally’s fiction; it is what lifts it above the narrow territory of the historical novel. Without it, the considerable number of his books which follow history closely would be little more than the faction Schindler’s Ark has sometimes been accused of being. It is tempting, of course, to suggest this moral vision is a result of Keneally’s early life as a seminarian. Patrick White infamously referred to him as that “rather revolting little bog-Irish almost priest”, before going on to observe, astutely enough, the tendency of Keneally’s fiction to lurch from moral grandeur to something far less exalted; a younger and angrier Keneally has himself written about his experiences in the priesthood in Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1969). But tempting as this sort of reductive psychologizing is, it cannot help but misrepresent the complex moral dramas Keneally’s fiction enacts. His vision is too deep and too broad to be confined by labels as narrow as Roman Catholic; it is closer in spirit to the nineteenth century than to the tortured doubts of Graham Greene.

In his native Australia, this distinction is more difficult to preserve because of the very visible connections between the obsessions of Keneally the public figure and the inner worlds of his fiction. When he agitates on behalf of refugees in detention, and then writes The Tyrant’s Novel (2003), a book which makes use of the experiences of one particular refugee, the problem is almost intractable, the fact of one obscuring the imaginative life of the other.

In narrative terms, the tension between his uncompromising vision and the dramas which animate his fiction is not an easy one to resolve, and it often drives the action of his novels towards resolutions which demand, as The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith does, the sacrifice of the character at their centre. In The Widow and Her Hero, Leo and his fellow survivors are beaten, tortured, illegally tried, clumsily executed and cast into pits as little more than meat. There is little that is surprising in the depiction of this sad and squalid process, not least because much of the detail is filtered through Leo, his words preserved on toilet paper returned to Grace by the interpreter who facilitated the torture and trial of the survivors. Leo and his companions go to their deaths stoically, borne up by the stereotypes they are fated to embody, reading P. G. Wodehouse to each other and putting on a performance of The Devil’s Disciple like heroes in a story we already know by heart.

For Grace, left behind, this knowledge is, in its way, too much to bear. Left to make sense of her memories, and the successive waves of revelation as historians and enthusiasts uncover new evidence of what went on in those last days, she comes to dread each new discovery, fearing that the Leo she remembers – the Leo she wants to remember – will be lost in it somehow. In the end that is The Widow and Her Hero’s masterstroke. For, even as she rages against the men who come to her seeking absolution for their part in the failures that abandoned Leo and the others to their deaths, Grace finds herself clinging to her memory of that beautiful boy in her parents’ yard, unwilling to let it go, her grief made expansive and annihilating. “The heroic pose is not designed for ultimate domesticity”, she writes in the final pages of her account:

"King and Country, Banzai, Blood and Fatherland, Semper Fidelis, Who Dares Wins. These are the mere trellises upon which men uncertain about their weakness grow their peculiar and imperfect intentions . . . . Ulysses on his return found not a wife to charm but suitors to fight. Nothing is learned, and everything is learned."

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James Bradley 's third novel, The Resurrectionist, will be published later this year.