A
Better Place by Stephen Daisley.
This is the third of Stephen Daisley’s novels that I have
read and once again, I am in awe of his seemingly effortless talent to evoke
myriad emotions from the reader as they journey through his characters’ lives,
completely involved and living each experience, good or bad, with them – and there
are so many searing, tragic experiences, for Stephen Daisley writes about war,
and he doesn’t pretty it up for the reader:
in spare, short sentences he tells the story of twin brothers from New
Plymouth in New Zealand’s North Island who, at the age of twenty enlist in the
Army at the beginning of the Second World War.
Roy and Tony Mitchell are jacks-of-all-trades. They are identical twins, but Tony is an
idealist and artistic. Roy is
relentlessly practical: what you see is
what you get.
They
have had a rough start to life: their
father was given land by the government when he came back from the First World
War but he also came back broken and turned to the drink. Their mother left them to fend for themselves
without a backward glance when they were fourteen. She’d had enough. After working for keep and learning stock handling,
fencing and all the other backbreaking toil associated with hard-scrabble
farming, the twins decide it’s time for a change: might as well go to war!
So they do, and end up at Maleme on the island of Crete
with their Battalion, retreating from a huge German Offensive in which Tony the
Introvert is believed lost. Bloody good
Joker Roy is understandably shattered, but he feels even worse because he ran
away like a coward, leaving his brother behind, and when he returned, could
only find Tony’s leg, shattered and shredded at the listening post where he
left him.
The fate of both brothers is masterfully revealed; Roy is shipped to Italy with his regiment,
and Tony becomes a Prisoner of War. He
is shown compassion by his captors,
while Roy sees the worst side of the enemy:
a whole village annihilated as the Allied troops came to liberate them: the feelings of the hapless reader (me!) are
trampled into the ground; this is how it
was, and this powerful, terrible story should – but won’t – act as a terrible,
sickening example of what war does to the world, how long it takes for nations
to recover, and the tragic fact, as evidenced by the Ukraine and Gaza, that
nobody learns War’s lessons. SIX STARS.
No comments:
Post a Comment