Books
The war at home
by Siobhan Harvey
At the human heart of Peter Wells’s rich new novel is the need for reconciliation.
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains,” wrote Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). The issue of not being straight, but rather of being gay, is one that has too often defined the output of innumerable homosexual authors, contemporary and historic, including Williams. It’s certainly a matter that has habitually, if you pardon the pun, straitjacketed analysis of writer and director Peter Wells.
His books have scooped a plethora of literary awards, including the 1992 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Dangerous Desires, the 2002 Montana Book Award for Biography for his superlative memoir, Long Loop Home, and the 2004 Deutz Medal for Fiction runner-up for Iridescence, but he remains frequently categorised as a gay author.
Yet, what marks out Wells’s new novel, Lucky Bastard, a dark tale linking Japanese World War II atrocities to the lives of a dysfunctional New Zealand family, the Keelings, isn’t its author’s sexuality, but rather the intricacy and fine prose of his story. In its astute examination of how the past informs the present, of how victims often become abusive arbiters and of how media and academia erase complexity in their insatiable pursuit of clear-cut definitions of history, the fire behind Lucky Bastard’s plot isn’t its rallying against homophobia, but rather its rallying against heartlessness and the inhumane. If Wells’s latest is proof of anything, it’s proof of the long overdue need to ditch its author’s gay-writer label.
At heart, Lucky Bastard is a novel about reconciliation. It’s a theme that runs through the narrative, whether Wells is describing Keeling pater, Eric’s sordid existence as an elite member of military personnel in occupied Japan, his fractious marriage to and separation from inoffensive secretary Olywn, or their children Ross and Alison’s childhood browbeating by their haunted father and adulthood discovery of Captain Eric’s past as a POW-cum-criminal adjudicator.
As the novel progresses, even the most minor actions – Eric’s acquaintance with hedonistic fatalist Caryl; Ross’s hand-holding in a dark cinema; Alison’s tensions with her wayward daughter; the siblings’ games of role reversal – are skilfully revealed by Wells to have redemptive value. The end result is an astutely layered book, whose full depths surface through rereading.
Lucky Bastard is also a novel of acute breadth, its individual and collective searches for resolution played out across the past and present, as well as across varying viewpoints. So, for instance, the novel is at its most fizzing when Alison and Ross offer intimate first-hand accounts of their multiple frictions. The use of diverse viewpoints is a judicious juggling act, and Wells rightly discerns that Eric’s historic story in postwar Japan needs a third-person narration to counterbalance his children’s confessional offerings.
Underpinning all this are well-observed small details. Late-1940s US-occupied Tokyo is enriched with references to US cultural hegemony, such as the silverscreen and theatre. The men wear Ronald Coleman moustaches, while an émigré Manhattan wife plays “at being a Broadway vamp, doing imitations of Ethel Merman grinding out ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’”.
Elsewhere, the distorted morals of Occupation are shown in concise, credible depictions of bath- and whore-houses, illicit drinking dens and shady military manoeuvrings. Cumulatively, Wells crafts a web of intertextuality that is crucial to keeping us enthralled.
“War is messy, we know that, but we have to fight through the murk of the past – to find the truth,” declares a fictionalised 60 Minutes reporter in Wells’s novel. If Lucky Bastard is, partly, a caustic study of how such fine aspirations elude investigative journalists and historians, the book and its author remain testaments to the axiom’s essential validity. Lucky Bastard is undeniably a rich book whose characters, at war with their histories, are often querulous, quarrelsome and, yes, occasionally just happen to be queer.
LUCKY BASTARD, by Peter Wells (Vintage, $27.99).
