This is a story of war told from the edges. Four
interweaving accounts relate the intimate havoc wrought
by military conflict on individual lives. It is spring
1940, and newly wed Elsa Jones is finding her way in
Hong Kong's ex-pat society. Lonely and homesick, she
finds an ally in her amah Lin, who has travelled
downriver from her native village in Canton, but their
friendship is clouded by Lin's own longing to be
reunited with her young sister and the simpler life of
her childhood. Hong Kong is changing by the day:
soldiers appear on the streets and bomb shelters spring
up around them, but, taken up by their own concerns,
both Elsa and Lin fail to notice the darkening of the
political landscape. When Hong Kong falls to the
Japanese, Elsa and her husband Tommy are captured and
interned in a makeshift camp on the southern side of the
island. Along with the rest of Hong Kong's European
elite, they have to knuckle down to the task of survival
in hostile surroundings. As the internees settle into
some kind of community on a rocky peninsula facing the
South China Sea, Elsa and Tommy find their relationship
tested to the limit. Ever optimistic, Tommy come up with
a plan to make the camp self-sufficient, but as the
mental pressure of internment grows his personal crusade
develops into an obsession so deep and dark that it
becomes a prison of its own. The final war story in this
lyrical novel is the poignant tale of baby Mari. When we
rejoin her in 1947 she is six years old, on her way home
from the Far East to a village on the coast of Wales.
Everyone tells her there is much to celebrate, not least
victory and a return to the securities of the past. But
for Mari camp life is all she has known. Her new home is
a cold, strange place riddled with secrets which can
only be decoded by eavesdropping on the broken,
confusing exchanges between the adults around her. As we
follow her desperate attempts to create a happy ending,
we learn more about the tragedies as well as the joys of
coming home.
|
|