Big Wars and Small Battles
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Big Wars and Small Battles By Lynne Sharon Schwartz SOME NOVELISTS are so single-minded that each of their books is a reworking of the same themes or obsessions: Jane Austen and...
...In her quest for serenity Alix is insufferable—and comical—as only a true believer can be...
...Since the age of seven he has lived with his wellmeaning but taciturn father and his loving, ineffectual grandmother...
...she's a nun, after all...
...Alix, to everyone's relief, has left the Serenity Corps (and cast off its shapeless brown garments...
...As its title promises, awful things happen in Critical Injuries: a shooting, imprisonment, betrayal, suicide, the blight of drug addiction and more—but Barfoot labors mightily to find optimism and redemption in their aftermath...
...Because to feel the eternal flame of true serenity, a person needs to be still...
...She becomes a top executive in a worldwide media outfit run by the notorious Wo family and rooted in crime and corruption...
...gradually it is revealed to be the apologia of a diabolical serial killer with epicurean tastes in food and crime...
...The vital issue is whether the grace attained at the close is warranted by events and character or forced by the author...
...Two key scenes determine Tom and Maria's fate...
...The last shreds of mist clinging to the Peak were being burned off by the sun...
...The contradiction is plain from the instant Tom's ship approaches...
...Alternating chapters are narrated by Isla, waking in a hospital bed to a rained future, and by Roddy, who ruined that future along with his own...
...on board ship he meets the people who will figure prominently in his Hong Kong future...
...Grace, she decides...
...Again, the style perfectly suits the subject, as transparent and satisfying as a precomputer ledger...
...The novel traces the city's transformation through the experience of its principal narrator, the clever, honorable and able Tom Stewart, who left England for Hong Kong when barely in his 20s to seek adventure...
...Reading them offers the pleasures of revisiting familiar places made new by seasonal changes in light and weather...
...This is a large order, especially from a wheelchair...
...Trouble in China, go to Hong Kong...
...At 48, Isla, director of a thriving ad agency and mother of two children in their 20s, has weathered a marriage that ended in disaster and found unexpected happiness with Lyle, her husband of six years...
...Other times, I think she's edging too close to the sophistries of Master Ambrose of the Serenity Corps...
...On Fiction Big Wars and Small Battles By Lynne Sharon Schwartz SOME NOVELISTS are so single-minded that each of their books is a reworking of the same themes or obsessions: Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky, for instance, or in our day Barbara Pym and Fay Weldon...
...I missed the psychological nuances of Lanchester's earlier books, but the compensation was a brilliant exposure of a great city, magically alluring on the surface, rotten at the core...
...lay low in the water...
...This is a complex, daunting chunk of history, but Lanchester orchestrates it with lucidity and skill, qualities that don't change from book to book...
...Only near the end of this intricate design do we discover how the fates of the three narrators are linked by a tragic irony...
...Lanchester's stint as a restaurant reviewer for the London Observer served him well...
...Twenty-five years later, when Maria's life is threatened by Wo Man-Lee—she has assisted the police in bringing corruption charges against him—Tom in turn begs her to flee...
...Still, what the two endure in the year following the shooting is remarkably similar...
...She sees that he's no monster...
...And then there is John Lanchester, former deputy editor of the London Review of Books...
...Observation, not introspection, is Tom's bent...
...To Barfoot's credit, she makes this a constantly elusive and unsettling problem...
...Some 15 years after a whirlwind romance, Isla's marriage to nasty, slick James had lost its savor...
...Fragrant Harbor is an energetic and colorful story, radiating from a very dark wisdom, the same that informs Lanchester's earlier works...
...Roddy tries to understand how he could have done such great harm when he meant no harm at all, at least no more than stealing a few hundred dollars...
...And a rather stiff-necked, pompous nun at Their suppressed yet not-quite-unfulfilled passion is the crucial thread running through Tom's story...
...With a refugee's ardor, Matthew struggles to save his business, now threatened by shifts in political power...
...Seeing her mother numb from the neck down, she spouts the Serenity Corps dogma: "If you can't move, it can make you go into yourself instead and find the truths of the spirit...
...When things go wrong, Roddy is stricken by remorse and powerless in the hands of the legal machinery...
...It still staggers me...
...After that dramatic opening, she examines how both victim and perpetrator can carry on and even reach some small measure of equanimity in the face of so terrible and irrevocable an event...
...Hong Kong was recovering, business was picking up, the hotel was getting back on its feet"— functional but less-than-thrilling sentences...
...Let's say intermittently...
...Most important among them is Sister Maria, a Chinese nun returning home to work as a missionary...
...In his view, the one decent act he can still perform is not to betray Mike's role in the crime...
...His Empire Hotel is the gathering place for business leaders, journalists, local police and politicians, and arrivistes from every comer of the globe...
...Individual striving and good character prove to be no match against the greater pressures of war, crime, money, and politics...
...The story is told by three narrators, each a distinct kind of outsider...
...I said: 'That's one way of describing it.' Maria smiled, 'Chinesejoke.'" With such a large canvas, much needs to be telescoped...
...You could probably transport a narrative paragraph from one Philip Roth or Hemingway novel to the next, altering the proper names, without readers feeling much of a jolt...
...I felt the purest excitement...
...the disasters wreaked by three wars—the Japanese invasion of China and Hong Kong, the Communist uprising against the Kuomintang, and World War II...
...With a bit of money from his share of the family pub, Tom embarks on a voyage halfway around the world...
...Of the postwar period, Tom reports, "Those were the busiest years of my life...
...Now comes Fragrant Harbor (Putnam, 342 pp., $25.95), a sweeping historical tale of Hong Kong from the early 1930s, when it was a British colony (or "territory," as the colonized preferred), up to and beyond thel997Chinese takeover...
...Heunggong...
...Into this configuration steps virtuous Matthew Ho, originally of Fujian, who wants to supply all of China with air conditioners while keeping his family safe in Sydney, Australia...
...Predictably, they fall in love, and unpredictably, r main in love for 30 years...
...Momentary, not enduring like her affliction...
...One is the moment when, barely escaping the Japanese troops in 1942, Tom insists on remaining in the city to take his chances spying for the British, even though Maria pleads with him to flee to China with her...
...The hapless 17-year-old Roddy, far from a hardened criminal, is gripped by panic...
...By the time of the shooting, Jamie is recovered but shaky...
...Does it work...
...It is a sophisticated, appealing story of family life put to the most grueling test...
...They have, the two of them, seen each other in each other's rawest form...
...Other writers, indeed the great majority, find fresh subjects and settings but keep their signature style and tone...
...Lanchester gives a harrowing account of Tom's escapades, capture, torture, and internment...
...An adage quoted throughout the novel is: "Trouble in Hong Kong, go to China...
...They require no social formalities...
...Spurred on by his friend Mike, who works in the icecream store, Roddy concocts the robbery...
...To escape the Cultural Revolution, Matthew's mother took her eight-year-old son on a perilous flight through rice paddies and rivers to reach the safety of Hong Kong...
...Fragrant harbor,'" Maria tells him...
...Canadian author Joan Barfoot's ninth novel, Critical Injuries (Counterpoint, 336 pp., $25.00), also presents an individual struggle against external forces of destruction, but in a more intimate context...
...He becomes thoroughly enmeshed in Hong Kong life, initially as a successful hotel manager, then as a war spy for the British, a brutalized prisoner of the Japanese, and finally an aged ruminator...
...But her quest has taken a new form: She has befriended Roddy and brings him to the party in an attempt at reconciliation, an act at once spiritually daring and unspeakably tactless...
...Tom has a second hotel, and the villainous Wo Man-Lee's corporate empire thrives with the help of Dawn Stone (Wo himself has fled to Taiwan to evade prosecution...
...But anyone expecting more of the same would have been surprised by Mr...
...The main agents of change are a constant influx of refugees from China and elsewhere...
...his finger tightens and the gun goes off, leaving Isla paralyzed...
...The junks were like overgrown child's toys, or things seen in a dream...
...It's not awful but a possibility, you see...
...In the end, everything is shown to be connected...
...Roddy is ordinary in every respect, or would be but for the fact that his mother was a manic depressive who killed herself...
...In fact her simmering rage and mordant wit save her from self-pity throughout, and make her ordeal a journey into the life of the mind, not the wreckage of the body...
...But the central and longest portion, the novel's heart and soul, is Tom Stewart's...
...and the growth of the triads (Mafia-like gangster associations) and their closely allied corporate interests, especially in electronics...
...Barfoot's attempt to bridge the gap between those two ways of seeing Alix' gesture provides the most risky and intriguing passage in the novel...
...The narrative moves steadily toward a confrontation between Isla and Roddy...
...The harbor had a distinct, dirty smell, too brackish to be mere seawater...
...She teaches Tom Cantonese, which gives him an entrée into the unknown world awaiting him...
...He is the only living novelist I can think of whose three books might have come from three very different authors...
...A British warship...
...Children and grandparents jostled on the decks, cooking and eating and living their lives...
...Or it would if I could stagger.'" Nonetheless, speaking to him civilly on her green lawn, she finds that "the onerous weight of revenge [has] lifted to make a space for—what...
...However misguided in practical terms, the choice helps him salvage an iota of self-respect during his year in reform school...
...A white-hot, inexplicable moment that "just happened," as Roddy keeps repeating in grief and dismay...
...rather, they share a curious intimacy: "This boy is actually someone from whom she needs to have very few privacies...
...She succeeds, mostly...
...As a last resort, he turns to the Wo conglomerate for help, a move that may prove personally devastating for reasons which, in deference to Lanchester's clever web, I cannot disclose...
...That the question keeps oscillating— as it does in everyday life—is a sign of Barfoot's subtle strength...
...That comes a year after the shooting, at a family gathering to celebrate Isla's return home—in a wheelchair, having regained the use of her upper body...
...Well-known in her own country, Barfoot is new to me and, I imagine, to most American readers, for whom a handful of names constitutes a sketchy knowledge of Canadian fiction—a state of affairs publishers should remedy...
...Jamie turned to drugs and Alix resorted to being an extra-good girl...
...He sees that she's all too real...
...property values have shot up and skyscrapers are everywhere...
...This in itself is prodigious, and the novels are splendid besides...
...Does that stagger you...
...he keeps a close eye on developments, and keeps us well informed too...
...Lyle is a sexy, kind-hearted lawyer and former widower, almost too noble to be true...
...She is meant to learn, if not forgiveness, then renunciation of anger...
...the adolescents naively dream of using the money to move to the city and lead exciting lives...
...The first is Dawn (born Doris) Stone, a fiercely ambitious thirtysomething London journalist who arrives in Hong Kong in the 1980s, quickly grasps the lay of the land, and achieves precisely what she wants: money and power...
...By the 1990s the horrors of wartime are buried, if not forgotten...
...Isla, resentful in her wheelchair, meets Roddy, who is sick with shame...
...Going into a shop to buy ice-cream cones while Lyle waits in the car...
...Both use the period of waiting—for release, for surgery—to look back on the past and to imagine the unimaginable future...
...The outcome suggests that it is easier to survive the Japanese occupying forces than the Chinese gangs...
...Barfoot's gift is to fully inhabit the minds and idioms of her characters, and Isla's mind is better stocked than Roddy's, her language richer and more evocative...
...Isla is trapped in the midst of a robbery...
...The chapters have pithy little titles, an oldfashioned and winning feature: It means a knowing intelligence is guiding us...
...the limp Union Jack hanging above Government House...
...Phillips (2000), an austere small gem about a day in the life of an out-of-work, quietly desperate accountant wandering through London, absorbed in his far-fetched but well-ordered fantasies...
...The last, and present-day, section is related by Matthew Ho, a young businessman who manages to combine a similarly fierce ambition with the traditional virtues of integrity and devotion to family...
...no twist in the plot has been arbitrary...
...When James was arrested for sexually abusing several teenaged girls in his employ, Isla was shocked and unforgiving, and banished him from the family...
...The exquisite, scrupulous writing mimics the delicately wrought sensibility of a narrator quite without scruples...
...On my more Zen-like days it seems Barfoot has pulled off a miraculous feat, reconciling natural antagonists...
...His narration is reportorial, not analytical...
...It becomes clear now why Barfoot dwelt on Isla's intransigence toward her first husband...
...Barfoot's meticulous writing makes us understand how such a moment could "just happen...
...His first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), takes the guise of a gourmet cookbook...
...Isla broods on the bizarre sensation (lack of sensation) of paralysis, rendered by Barfoot with painful acuity, and on her first marriage and her troubled children, Jamie and Alix...
...Isla is not kind but frank: '"You shot me,' she says in wonder...
...Alix has joined the Serenity Corps, a cult-like group led by one Master Ambrose...
...The Isla chapters are superior to the Roddy chapters...
...With all the stubbornness of piety and principle, she refuses...
...Born in Hamburg, raised in Calcutta and Hong Kong, educated at Oxford, Lanchester is equally peripatetic in his writing...
...Isla is appalled but forbearing...
...In any case, she has vividly shown a family fransformed by calamity...
...Removing clothes, exposing histories, is nothing next to that moment...
...they looked like smoke, as if the island were an active volcano...
...The country house he renovated is the charmed setting for a midlife idyll that is shattered in the worst way...
...They don't meet again until after the War...
...Together they endure the violence of the Japanese assault, and together, with the best of intentions, they unwittingly further the fortunes of the corrupt Wo brothers, whose machinations will eventually destroy Sister Maria and leave Tom bereft and embittered...
...Both are imprisoned— Roddy literally, Isla in her damaged body...
Vol. 85 • July 2002 • No. 4
