Books
Closeted worlds
by Jolisa Gracewood
A revelatory portrait of love in wartime.
You know how it’s often a minor character who sticks in your mind long after the movie – or book – is over? Both these debut novels revolve around a charismatic figure who mesmerises a plain, unconfident woman; and both feature phlegmatic Kiwi blokes who steal the show in inverse proportion to their time on the page.
The Orphan Gunner, by Sara Knox (sister of Elizabeth), masterfully conjures the lost world of women pilots in World War II. Dutiful Olive is sent to England, on the eve of war, to persuade her friend Evelyn to come home to Australia. But Evelyn is perfectly happy delivering planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary, not to mention being a real ladykiller in her dashing flight suit. So Olive stays in England and finds war work of her own, as well as a conveniently absent boyfriend.
Knox beautifully evokes both the drudgery and exhilaration of wartime – the atmosphere and dialogue are bang-on – while keeping the ambiguous relationship between drab Olive and glamorous Evelyn at a steady Sapphic simmer. The action suddenly takes off in another direction when Evelyn’s brother Duncan turns up. But it’s his mate Lofty, a Kiwi, who is a real character in every sense of the phrase. Wisecracking, philosophical, unpredictable, sincere, Lofty quietly walks away with every scene he’s in.
When Duncan – who’s not really gunner material – loses his bottle, the friends collaborate on a daring masquerade. You see it coming a long way off (thanks to some unforgivably detailed jacket copy), but Knox generates a plausible degree of suspense about whether they’ll be able to pull it off.
Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch, perhaps an inevitable comparison, vividly illuminated the way wartime allowed new kinds of lesbian self-expression. Knox’s more straightforward narrative draws a coy veil over whether Olive and Evelyn ever share more than a pillow in bed. It’s a curious choice in a book that otherwise goes a long way towards constructing a revelatory portrait of love in wartime.
Susan Pearce’s fascinating debut novel, Acts of Love, introduces a similarly closeted world: that of the religious cult. In wonderfully assured prose, Pearce shows us both the attractions and the hazards of cloistered religious fellowship.
In Minneapolis in the early 1960s, insecure young Rita joins People Under God’s Command, seeking a sense of purpose, as well as refuge from her martyr-like mother and sharp-tongued father. The movement has other attractions, too: Rita has fallen in love at first sight with Leland Swann, the commune’s handsome but emotionally constipated leader. In fact, she distinctly heard God say that she will marry him.
This is a problem. Life in the Movement is all about “Listening” for the word of God, but Leland’s not so hot on women hearing things that don’t mesh with his plan for the movement, or with his private misogyny. Pining for Leland’s attention, Rita confides in her attractive roommate, Betty, and a nice New Zealand bloke called Bill. Soon enough there’s a wedding, but not the one Rita was expecting.
Pearce’s portrayal of life inside the commune is utterly convincing: a pressure-cooker of mutual surveillance and ritual sexism, its formal monasticism comically at odds with the increasingly free-love society beyond. This material alone would have made a splendid story. But Pearce moves the narrative into the present and to New Zealand when the recently widowed Leland makes a surprise visit to Rita, long settled in Wellington with Bill.
The novel mounts to a crackling finale, although the drama is more contrived and less convincing than earlier. There’s tension between the ageing guru and Rita’s adult daughter Stella – who, in a crisis of faith after the end of a long relationship, has moved home to carry out a secret mission of her own.
And Bill? He quietly potters around being patient and kind, the very model of Corinthian love. Look past the puffed-up preacher; Bill is the genuine article, the unsung star of this intriguing, unusual novel.
The Orphan Gunner, by Sara Knox (Giramondo, $37.99)
Acts of Love, by Susan Pearce (Victoria University Press, $30)
