Two new Australian novels explore the lasting effects of war

TWO new Australian novels explore the lasting effects of war.

FICTION: DREAMING THE ENEMY

David Metzenthen, Allen & Unwin, $19.99

FICTION: THE GUN ROOM

Georgina Harding, Bloomsbury, $27.99

TWO fine new novels – one Australian aimed at teenagers, the other British for a general/literary adult audience – explore the long-term effects of war, particularly the Vietnam war, on those who were forced to experience it. None of the protagonists can return simply to their old preoccupations: at school his teachers said Johnny Shoebridge lacked imagination, now he is plagued by far too much of the stuff, too easily seeing the grey laminex surface of his mother’s kitchen table as an aerial photo of a US airstrike.

Wandering the country in an attempt to clear his head and find some direction in his changed-for-ever life, Johnny puts his imagination to more constructive use, and as he reluctantly yet ineluctably relives his days as a 19-year-old conscript in Vietnam he creates in his mind’s eye a young Vietnamese, Khan, based on a skinny enemy soldier encountered in a battle, and gives him two companions, Thang and Trung, to parallel his own best mates, Lex and Barry. Khan’s memories and post-war experiences keep elegant but unobtrusive step with Johnny’s until both reach a point from which they can move on into a more promising future.

As he interweaves the aimless, exhausting present with the horrific past Johnny/Metzenthen keeps always before the reader the fact that Khan’s side of the battle is a feat of the imagination, one over which he cannot claim the kind of knowledge and understanding, however second-hand, that he brings to the Australian side of the story. There is a painful authority, however, to some of the emblematic Australian experiences he gives Shoebridge: the woman who self-righteously condemns him for his part in the invasion, and the RSL barflies who jeer at the conflict that has derailed his life: “Couldn’t really call it a war, could yer?” This is a finely constructed, movingly raw and confronting novel that lends itself brilliantly to classroom discussion and compulsory digestion by politicians. What on Earth did we think we were doing?

Georgina Harding’s lyrical novel canvasses a wider range of similar experiences. It brings together a Norfolk farmer suffering post-traumatic stress years after his experiences on the Burma Railroad and a Japanese grandfather who fought in the same place on the other side, along with an American involved in atrocities in Vietnam and the British farmer’s now-adult son who took an iconic photograph of the American in a state of deep inward-looking shock and sold it to the world press. None of them can cope with what has happened in their lives: the Japanese grandfather spends his time training trees rigorously into bonsai but is haunted by the earth that for him is still blotted and stained with blood. Jonathan the photographer and Jim the American soldier both end up teaching English in Japan, more at home in that busy, polite, incurious society than in their own: they have their own haunting memories of blood-soaked soil.

A beautifully written book, its prose a continuing understated pleasure to read, its chapter headings often posing gentle, allusive little riddles in the novel’s timelines, The Gun Room raises both direct and subliminal questions not only about the devastating, far-reaching legacies of war, but also about the uses and responsibilities of photography and the relationship of shooting photographs and shooting weapons. It is significant that the photograph that haunts Jonathan most is the one he didn’t take, while the one that makes him famous is the one he would prefer to forget. For such a restrained, gentle, elegiac novel this book raises a number of seminal questions.

Originally published as Two new Australian novels explore the lasting effects of war