Tag Archives: post-traumatic stress

When Memory Plays Tricks: Devastation Road

20 Monday Nov 2017

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Review: Devastation Road, by Jason Hewitt
Little, Brown, 2015. 379 pp. $20

In spring 1945, an injured man wakes in a field. He’s got only the vaguest idea of who he is–he’s English, and his name is Owen–but he’s wearing clothes that don’t fit, he can’t remember how he got hurt, why he’s where he is, how he got there, or where there is, except that it must be Europe. To judge from what he sees, it must be Central Europe, but he can’t tell what country.

Marshal Konev leads the Red Army into Prague, May 1945 (courtesy Karel Hájek, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Czech boy, Janek, who speaks barely a word of English, adopts him and claims to have rescued him, but Owen’s not sure of that, and, to some extent, resents how Janek sticks to him like glue. But the boy is useful, scrounging food and keeping a keen eye out for dangers that Owen might otherwise blunder into. Through Janek, Owen also learns that there’s a war on, and he slowly realizes that he’s played a part in it, and what that part is. Eventually, they meet a Polish woman, Irena, who attaches herself to them, though each has a different aim. Owen wants to go home. Janek insists he must find his brother, Petr, a Resistance hero. Irena, whose head has been shaved, says that she just wants to be safe–it’s hard for a Jew, she says–but you get the idea that she wants someone to take care of her, and Owen, as an Englishman, is the obvious choice.

I like the way Hewitt pieces together his narrative, showing how Owen gradually realizes who he is, memories triggered by a button, a phrase on a scrap of paper, a facial expression, or how light looks. As images return to him of his former employment as a draftsman for an aircraft manufacturer; his older brother, Max; their parents; and Max’s fiancée, the reader senses that Owen’s disorientation isn’t just post-traumatic stress. He’s also suppressing certain memories out of guilt.

To weld these disparate fragments into a coherent narrative takes great skill, and nearly all Hewitt’s transitions between past and present meld seamlessly. His descriptions, based on apparently thorough research, effortlessly depict the era and the settings. Further, he conveys Owen’s fluid, ever-varying states of mind with authority:

It was not that he was lost that concerned him most. Nor was it that he had found himself in a war that he remembered so little about, which now seemed to be consuming everything and everyone within it. Nor was it that he had ended up in an obscure country that in the past had been nothing more than a strange name in the news broadcasts, or, even, that somehow he seemed to have wiped several years from his mind. No, what concerned him most was that things he now knew for sure–and knew that he knew–could suddenly be lost again, and then found, and lost once more, as if they had never been there in the first place.

Despite these attributes, rendered in lucidly beautiful prose, Devastation Road presents quite a few obstacles. Chief among them is how irritating all three main characters are. Owen seems too earnest, even clueless, to be a survivor, and it’s hard to believe he was involved in the war, because he lacks the necessary guile or instinct that warriors must possess if they’re to overcome the inevitable setbacks they face. Janek is too much the entitled teenager for my taste, as if he too hasn’t reckoned with or been leveled by the war, even though he grew up in it. He evokes flickers of sympathy, yet the narrative grabs most when he’s not involved. Irena’s truly appalling, selfish as the day is long, and it’s pretty obvious she’s lying about something. What has happened to her is both awful and painful, sure, and even holds the potential for tragedy, but that side feels too mechanical and distant, so that her grasping nature overshadows the rest.

Devastation Road works best, I think, as a study of one man’s psychology, the story of his unfolding, tricky memory. If you can hold onto that, the novel will be worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Child Love: The Light Between Oceans

24 Monday Jul 2017

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Review: The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman
Scribner, 2012. 343 pp. $25

Tom Sherbourne returns to his native Australia after the First World War deeply disturbed by what he saw and did and seeking solitude. He has nothing and no one to hold onto, and he finds what he thinks is the perfect job, tending a lighthouse on a forlorn island off the Australian coast. There, no one will ask him about his past, and his exacting, meticulous duties will keep him busy for the months that stretch between brief shore leaves.

Tom wonders why he survived the war when so many others didn’t or came home physically or emotionally maimed. But that’s not the only trauma to trouble his dreams. His mother left home when he was a young boy–or did his father, a cold tyrant with no access to any feelings except anger, throw her out? Either way, both have passed from Tom’s life, and his brother Cecil, the favored son due to inherit the family business, is equally unapproachable in Tom’s eyes, though it’s not clear why. But it’s enough to know that Tom Sherbourne has no family to speak of, or to.

Supplies being unloaded for South Solitary Island lighthouse, Australia, 1946, unknown photographer (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

However, on shore leave, he meets Isabelle Graysmark, a spirited, adventurous young woman, and they’re immediately attracted. Tom, much older and badly bruised, distrusts the vulnerability where tender feelings lead, and she practically has to convince him to marry her. He dares hope that Izzy will be his reward, however undeserved, for having survived a miserable childhood and the war. For her part, Izzy believes implicitly that she couldn’t have found a more loyal, steadfast, and loving husband, or a more nurturing father for their children. She only wishes he’d tell her what happened to him before they met.

To their delight, Izzy becomes pregnant almost immediately but miscarries–and again, and again. Each time, she blames herself, and what’s worse, she can’t understand his reaction. He aches for her, he’s sad and sorry, but he’s not devastated for himself. He cherishes their lives together as the first tenderness he’s ever known, a gift that many soldiers serving under him never got the chance to receive. He understands what she doesn’t, that life is often unfair, and that there’s no malign intent involved or blame to pass around, only bad luck and circumstance. But Izzy thinks his gratitude for what they have means that he’s cold and hurtful, incapable of feeling. And one night, when a rowboat lands near the lighthouse carrying a dead man and a young infant, the Sherbournes make a desperate decision that will mark their lives and others’.

The Light Between Oceans is an accomplished novel, and Stedman’s first. At its best, the narrative touches the lyrical and depth of insight and makes them one. Consider Tom’s first view of the island, before he meets Izzy:

Hundreds of feet above sea level, he was mesmerized by the drop to the ocean crashing against the cliffs directly below. The water sloshed like white paint, milky-thick, the foam occasionally scraped off long enough to reveal a deep blue undercoat. At the other end of the island, a row of immense boulders created a break against the surf and left the water inside it as calm as a bath. He had the impression he was hanging from the sky, not rising from the earth. Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he hear the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges.

It’s a good novelist who can make beautiful sentences draw the reader into a character’s inner life without calling attention to themselves. And in focusing her characters on the most primal attachment, that for a child, Stedman evokes tremendous power from a relatively simple story. I say relatively because she requires more coincidence and suspension of disbelief than I like, but once you get past that, there’s no denying the passions or the moral issues involved.

I have a harder time getting around Izzy’s character. I like how the spontaneous girlishness hides other, dangerous levels, but–without giving away too much–I think she becomes unglued, and by the time I finished the book, I didn’t like her much. Liking a main character isn’t requisite, but I wanted to feel more sympathy for her than I did, and I might have, had she struggled with the momentous decision that drives the narrative or consider how it might affect someone else. Instead, she sets her mind and seldom thinks about it again–refuses to, even.

All the same, Stedman’s a very good writer, and The Light Between Oceans will make you think.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Facing Life After So Much Death: The Heroes’ Welcome

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Heroes’ Welcome, by Louisa Young
Harper Perennial, 2015. 263 pp. $15

The Great War has ended only five months before, and Riley Purefoy bears its scars in the most obvious spot: At the Somme, part of his jaw was blown away. Reconstructive surgery has worked marvels, yet children flee from him, he can’t speak clearly, and must drink his tea from a brass tube. Nevertheless, his prewar sweetheart, Nadine Waveney, marries him, trusting to their mutual honesty and understanding to carry them through. No physical wound can obscure from Nadine the kind, courageous, caring man beneath, and she served as a nurse, after all–though she worries, to herself, whether he’ll ever be able to kiss her or make love. The newlyweds’ parents don’t know what shocks them most: Riley’s appearance, that the young couple married without telling them, or that they married at all. Isn’t it obvious Riley’s in no condition to be anyone’s husband or provider? And what of their class differences, since she comes from money, and he, from nothing?

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, British sailor wounded at Jutland, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive reconstructive facial surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, wounded British sailor, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive plastic surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, his close friend and commanding officer, Peter Locke, has returned from war outwardly whole but a psychological wreck, victim of what today would be called post-traumatic stress. He drinks constantly, has recurrent nightmares about the men he commanded who died in battle, and shuts himself away from his wife, Julia, and their toddler son, Tom. He’s a hard case, Peter, but Julia’s too shallow and self-absorbed to help him. Having sensed their growing estrangement during the war, she decided that she, and not the stress of war, must be the cause, and applied carbolic acid to her face as a beauty treatment. Naturally, she doesn’t get the results she wanted.

The juxtaposition of the two disfigured characters, one of whom can see inside himself and others, while the other sees only surfaces, is a brilliant stroke. It’s one of many in this excruciatingly painful, tender, lyrical, and, by turns, uplifting novel. All four main characters, plus Peter’s cousin Rose, a maternal woman who thinks her role is to pick up the pieces that others let drop, have well-drawn inner lives.

Nadine and Riley come across most clearly, and their wakening to one another and the world where beauty and love for life still exist makes for a satisfyingly real romance. For those interested in such things, Nadine means “hope,” and Riley, “courageous,” while Purefoy suggests the French for “pure faith.” (Contrast with the Malfoys of Harry Potter fame.) Nadine and Riley live up to their names, but only with struggle. Riley hates even the suggestion of pity and is so determined to accept nothing that could even remotely imply charity that he tries the patience of everyone who cares for him. As for Peter and Julia, they’re not finished with each other, despite what it looks like, though it take a while for even a glimmer of hope to show itself.

The Heroes’ Welcome makes difficult reading, at times. The grimness of Riley’s appearance and prospects hit hard, early, putting the reader in the parents’ and in-laws’ places, seeing him for the first time since his wound. Peter’s nightmares are duly horrific, and his behavior hard to take. But I sensed a wave of warmth, compassion, and zest for life gently lapping at the characters’ pain, so that their suffering is by no means all you see. As Nadine observes about art treasures she visits on her honeymoon to Italy:

 

This educational voyage, arranged by a most knowledgeable guide, was peeling mud and sorrow off her soul. She remembered suddenly, one morning, wounded soldiers arriving from the battlefields after days of travel caked in mud, in a dried-out carapace that had to be chipped off them . . . a clay shell like a gypsy’s roasted hedgehog, and God knows what wounds and damage you’d find inside. Every day the cities and the paintings exposed to her long, deep unities of humanity, strong living channels that emerged from the depths of the past like crystal streams bursting from a cavern.

 

Such lyrical prose, with frequent, ironic metaphors (facing facts, or putting a good face on things), is another satisfaction of this terrific novel. I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.