BOOK REVIEW: ABOVE THE EAST CHINA SEA

     I do love me some Sarah Bird.  By which I mean that I love her novels, but I also mean that I have a very strong sense that if I were ever to actually meet her, I would want so badly to be her BFF.  Her books glow with wacky humor and deep compassion.  Her sharp intelligence enlivens all of her intricate plotlines and their satisfying conclusions.  She's one of the handful of authors whose names I periodically Google to see if they've published any new novels, and if they have, I scoop them up.  That's how I found out about Bird's ninth novel, ABOVE THE EAST CHINA SEA (Vintage Press, April 2015).

     Unlike her other novels, this one didn't draw me in at first.  Writers are always told to begin a story with a hook, and I have to admit that a first chapter consisting of a conversation in stylized language between a dead fetus and his dead teenaged mother missed the sweet spot for me by a wide margin.  But this was Sarah Bird, so I persevered.  I'm glad I did.
     We don't learn the name of Tamiko, the pregnant 15-year-old, who lived on Okinawa and died during World War II, until much later in the book, but we do learn a lot about her life before the War.  Her two parents exemplify opposite ends of the social spectrum at the time: her mother comes from a long line of pragmatic, rough-mannered Okinawan peasant farmers, while her father's family has long followed white-collar pursuits - mathematics and calligraphy -  and considers itself refined and elegant, superior in every way to those who toil in the fields.  Tamiko is ashamed of her mother, and ashamed that she takes after her physically: dark skin, round face, broad feet.  Her older sister Hatsuko, on the other hand, seems to have inherited more of her father's genes, and is everything Tamiko longs to be: beautiful, graceful, sophisticated.  Of course, Hatsuko was selected last year to be one of the Princess Lily girls - the chosen few from the entire island who will be invited to attend the one and only girls' high school.  Tamiko is up for the selection process this year, but she has almost no hope for her own prospects and is more or less resigned to her fate - a lifetime of farm work - in advance.  But when the war suddenly arrives on Okinawan shores in the form of invading American ships, the old social order is instantly upended.
     Switch gears to the book's other story, also set on Okinawa but 70 years after Tamiko's.  Luz James is a tough-talking, rule-breaking 17-year-old military brat who pulls off looking like she has her shit together, but secretly contemplatesending it all by jumping off one of the island's high black cliffs.  For Luz, Okinawa is just one more in the endless series of her mother's interchangeable short-term postings.  At first her mother pumps her up about the prospect of meeting their Okinawan relatives - Luz's maternal grandmother was from the island - but that idea is shut down totally after her mother receives a mysterious letter she refuses to discuss with Luz.  So now, the only difference between Okinawa and anyplace else, as far as Luz is concerned, is that this is the first time she's started over in a new place as an only child. When Luz's older sister stunned her by enlisting right out of high school and then promptly getting herself killed on her first deployment, Luz lost the only person who made her feel like she mattered.  All she's doing now is going through the motions of hanging out with yet another band of base-kid stoners while trying to decide whether it's even worth the effort.  But that begins to change when Luz finds herself trapped in a cave and follows the sound of whimpering until she comes upon a starving, wounded young Okinawan girl who wordlessly begs Luz for help - not for herself, but for her tiny newborn baby.  And it changes even more when she leads Jake, the handsome Okinawan boy who follows Luz to the cave because he's worried about her, back to where she saw the girl and her baby.  But now, only minutes later, there's nothing there but a pile of bones.
     But what's even crazier is how matter-of-factly Jake reacts when Luz can finally bring herself to tell him about the disappearing girl in the cave.  "This is Okinawa," he tells her.  "This is how it is: We live with the dead and the dead live with us.  It's not spooky or creepy or woo-woo; it's just how it is."  But what Jake fails to mention at that point is how much more true all of this becomes during the three-day festival of Odon, when the line between the living and the dead becomes so thin that it requires almost no effort to slip across it  - in either direction.
     I don't know about you, but my knowledge of Okinawa has, until now, begun and ended with Mr. Miaggi.  Wax on, wax off.  I didn't know that Japan had used Okinawa as a pawn in World War II, putting it in harm's way and then not even making a pretense of defending it.  I didn't know that, despite the fact that Okinawa had no stake in the outcome of the War, something like a third of its population was killed by the end of it.  And I didn't know that afterward, part of Japan's peace treaty with the Allied forces was its agreement to cede about one-fifth of Okinawa (which was given no say in the matter) to be used for American military operations. 

Or that it didn't matter to the Americans what they were plowing under - fertile fields, ancient burial grounds - in order to build their bases and airstrips.  I didn't know that the tiny island of Okinawa has been shamelessly screwed over by more powerful forces, time after time after time.
     I was bothered by one gaping plot hole.  There's a ton of backstory for all the major players, and a huge emphasis on family, but Luz's absent father barely even gets a mention.  Still, to me this omission is heavily outweighed by the sheer pleasure of reading this lovely novel and following its clues until, at the end, the reader fully understands how and why - as the Okinawans say - "life is the treasure."

BOOK REVIEW: A GOD IN RUINS, by Kate Atkinson

    


     Very close to the end of this book, which is built on the framework of the Second World War, Atkinson gets into the numbers.  "Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from [presumably only British] Bomber Command."  By that point, having not quite emerged from the long, ordinary, astonishing fictional life of one Edward Beresford Todd, the reader understands the significance of the number.  Those were 55,573 similar stories never told, similar lives never lived.
     You don't need to have read Atkinson's TIME AFTER TIME (here's my review) to appreciate this beautiful new companion novel.  In fact, not having read it might spare you some confusion, because didn't that book end (and also begin) with Ursula Todd, Teddy's sister, killing Hitler in front of a roomful of his hangers-on just as his political star was starting to rise?  Her lifespan from that point on could only have been counted in seconds, and very few of those.  But now, in A GOD IN RUINS, don't we see Ursula surviving the War and dying in late middle age following a stroke?  And wait - if Hitler had been killed in the early 1930's, would there even have been a War? 
     But you would not have been confused for long, because you would have known before even cracking the cover of A GOD that Time, as we know it, does not bind Atkinson; it's her plaything, not her prison.  Which is not to say that Teddy, Ursula's beloved younger brother and their mother's favorite child, is not slowly and inexorably being crushed - ruined - under its weight, just as the rest of us are.  And he lacks Ursula's handy-dandy knack (see TIME AFTER TIME) of repeatedly dying and then popping back up again in what start out, at least, as the exact same circumstances as before.  But Atkinson doesn't need the flashy gimmicks to prove to us that Teddy will come back again.  All she needs is a few lowkey mentions of the Buddha, and the song of a skylark.
     The pre-War Teddy Todd is an amiable, bright-enough young man of no particular talent or ambition who seems destined to remain in a despised career in banking because he can't think of anything better to do.  When the War arrives, he hits rather haphazardly on the idea of training to be a bomber pilot.  Then he goes off to serve his country.  Years later, when his plane is shot down over Germany, he is taken prisoner.  After the War ends, he marries the literal girl next door, the one he's loved since the age of three.  Teddy stumbles into a job as a columnist ("Nature Notes") for his local newspaper, which eventually becomes the editorship, which eventually becomes his career.  He and Nancy have a daughter.  Some nine years later, Nancy develops a brain tumor, and dies not long after.  Teddy raises Viola by himself.  She grows up to be a one-woman horror show.  When she abandons her own two children, Teddy raises them by himself too.  He gardens.  He cooks.  He does not travel, or fall in love again, or develop meaningful friendships, or have epiphanies about the meaning of life.  Time passes.  Teddy retires from the newspaper; quietly grows old, then very old;  misses all those he has loved and lost; dies.  An uncomplicated story about an uncomplicated man.  Neither of which is even possible.
     Teddy's is a life lived with decency, and Atkinson shows us, step by step, how it's done.  Teddy has fulfilled his duty to Bomber Command after 30 runs, but he knows he's a good, steady pilot who inspires confidence in his crews, so he signs up again.  And then again.  By the time he's captured, he has completed 72 bombing runs. Rained death and destruction on the Germans; done much more than his part to crush the German was machine. The postwar Teddy is well aware of the cost of his bargain with the devil, although in hindsight he would have made the same choices, and  Atkinson includes those numbers too, lest we forget: 7 million German dead, including 500,000 killed by Allied bombers. 

 

                                            Hamburg (one of the cities Teddy's crew bombed)

Five hundred thousand, including, perhaps, a white-haired, mechanically-inclined orphan boy whose song Anthony Doerr sings to us in ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE. Who's to say that fictional people don't exist in the same dimension as each other, especially during the chaos and displacement of wartime?
     Before her mind has been ravaged by the tumor, Nancy asks Teddy to help her die when the time comes.  Although he cannot bring himself to make the promise, he does bring himself to keep it.  Of course, this act of heroism is not without consequences either: unbeknownst to Teddy, Viola is a silent witness of the scene. Could it be part of the reason she becomes such an inhuman adult?  Why she eventually becomes so relentless in her efforts to move Teddy along the old-age conveyor belt toward his demise? 
     Without drama, without expecting anything in return, Teddy saves the lives of his grandchildren, Sunny and Bertie, with his patient, quotidian love for them.  But this good deed somehow goes unpunished: unlike Viola, they love him in return, each in his or her own way.
     The lesser joys of reading a Kate Atkinson novel are too many to list.  Bertie's hilarious parenthetical commentary on her mother is the voice in our ear of the snarky best friend we wish we had. Teddy, much to his chagrin, is the involuntary subject of his flamboyant, childless Aunt Izzie's  hugely successful series of boys' books, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGUSTUS ( "What makes you you?  What do you like doing?  Who are your friends?  Do you have a thingamajig, you know -" she said, struggling for alien vocabulary, "David and Goliath - a slingshot thingy?")  And then, as if Augustus were not enough of a cross to bear, Viola becomes a novelist, specializing in thinly-veiled revisionist history, and he becomes her antihero ("He also failed (apparently) to understand that the book - young girl, brilliant and precocious, troubled relationship with her single-parent father, etcetera - was about them.  Surely he knew that?  Why didn't he say something?")  Ah.  Point well taken, Kate Atkinson.  Not all literary incarnations are rewards for a life well lived.
     "A man is a god in ruins," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature.  Atkinson has the heart and wisdom  to celebrate both aspects of the dialectic.  Thanks to her, Teddy's song lives on.  Happy Father's Day, Edward Beresford Todd.

ROSE UNDER FIRE: BOOK REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY CONTEST

     Elizabeth Wein is the author of CODE NAME VERITY, which I've reviewed here on this blog.  As soon as I learned months ago that Wein was following that book up with a not-sequel-exactly, I pre-ordered ROSE UNDER FIRE.  I was mostly through reading it when I wandered onto Wein's website and discovered that she was going to be doing an East Coast book tour and that today she would be at Children's Book World in Haverford, PA.  And since that was her closest stop to where I live, I decided to drive the two hours each way just to be able to see her.  Which I did.

                                        

 

(I'm the doofus on the left with my eyes closed)

 

CODE NAME VERITY

     I've been trying hard this weekend to wrestle my book into submission. It has two things it needs to be ready for fairly soon: submission of the first 15 pages for critiques at the NJSCBWI annual conference at the beginning of June (due April 30th), and submission of the first 5,000 words for the Greenhouse Literary Funny Contest (due at the end of July).  I may well have to submit for the critiques before my first draft is complete, but I truly hope that it will be done before I submit for the contest.
     But when I haven't been writing this weekend, I've been reading, and crying over, Elizabeth Wein's CODE NAME VERITY (Hyperion 2012).  There are so many brilliant plot twists and surprises in this YA novel that I'm afraid to say anything about the story for fear of revealing something I shouldn't.  Loose talk costs lives, as the two heroines are wont to say to each other - tongue-in-cheek, but not.  But I can safely say that the book is set in 1943 in England, Scotland and occupied France, and it follows the paths of two young women and their soul-deep friendship through their various roles in the Allied war effort. Each of them in turn tells her own story for her own reasons, and the reasons may not be as they first appear.  But that's all I feel I can say other than: please put this book high on your reading list. Right now I'm feeling as if I've lived through the War myself over the course of this weekend, and that as grueling as the experience has been, I wouldn't trade it for anything. It isn't often that I read a book and come away feeling honored to have met the characters.