Heroes and Unheroes of War

It is strange how topics for novels run with the zeitgeist of a butterfly’s wing. These last few years readers and viewers have had special themes—Second World War notebooks, love, the Thai-Burma railway, and civilian responses to the Second World War. Five recent novels, one biography and three films can fit into these categories. Some have been awarded prizes, others overlooked. Overall, there has been a challenging interest in wartime heroics and the unheroic individual. But the search for stories with notebooks and provenance would suggest writers and readers are looking for the authentic.

The six books:

• Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime

• Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

• Simon Mawer, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

• Steven Carroll, A World of Other People

• Kate Atkinson, Life after Life

• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

The three films:

• The Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky

• Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie

• The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum

Nicholas Shakespeare’s book, taken from his aunt’s wartime notebooks, and the three films are the biographies. Ms Jolie insisted on the physical authenticity of atrocity and had her leading man on a punishing diet to achieve a starvation physique. This is also well described in Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize novel that began life as his father’s prison memoirs of the Thai-Burma camps, although the main character morphs into a heroic wartime surgeon, loosely based on Weary Dunlop’s prisoner-of-war experiences.

The books by Mawer, Carroll and Atkinson are first-rate novels dealing with, mostly, the Blitz period in London and France. Mawer’s heroine is a bilingual beauty of great derring-do, a whiz with her pistol. She doesn’t find love in occupied France, but male protection. We want her to take the flight to London, but she honourably turns back and is captured by the Gestapo. Carroll, Atkinson and Shakespeare have a rattling good go at describing the civilian take on war. Nicholas Shakespeare’s Aunt Priscilla is married to a viscount at the onset of war. Another beauty, she muddles through with a lapsed identity card, a nasty extended French family, and rather a lot of lovers that are close to the higher levels of the Nazis. The Gestapo interrogates her, but somehow we know she will see the white cliffs of Dover relatively unscathed in 1945—and keep her diaries.

There is a whiff of the unheroic doing extraordinary things in wartime—dabbling in the black market, playing musical chairs in Soho pubs, doing cryptic crosswords in the underground. Atkinson has an architect character who sits on the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral to extinguish fires with sand during the Blitz. There is a wonderful depiction of ordinary people going to work in the day and volunteering at night. Steven Carroll has his heroine Iris in the roof space of the Faber & Faber building in London, watching the end of the Blitz with T.S. Eliot. Atkinson and especially Carroll do an evocative reading of civilian experience; the sense of striving to find meaning in life and love embedded in that quintessentially English expression, “Are you all right?”

The films are biopics with strong documentation to support authenticity. All describe extremes of hardship, torture, war tribunals and the punishment or non-punishment of the perpetrators. Flanagan and Teplitzky look closely at the Thai-Burma camps and examine the relationship between the tortured and torturer.

At the very centre of Flanagan’s novel is a para­graph of great presence—watching the beating of Darky; many wanting it to finish so they could eat. Flanagan’s hero, Dorrigo Evans, realises he is complicit with his opposite in rank, an amphetamine-addicted Japanese officer. He can do nothing, his bargaining bag is empty, a casualty of war.

Teplitzky’s film and Flanagan’s novel take up the nuances of post-war punishments. There is a distinct difference between the European Hague trials and those of the Pacific. One has a sense of American distaste for retribution and an interest in a continuation of Japanese social structure. In The Railway Man Eric Lomax discovers that his torturer has avoided punishment and is, grotesquely, a tourist guide in the same camp where he so assiduously beat the English prisoners. In the same vein, one of Flanagan’s Japanese characters becomes the CEO of a blood bank. Possibly the worst of post-war punishment has to be Alan Turing’s in The Imitation Game. In an inept hunt for Cold War spies, he is accidentally exposed as a homosexual. He and his detective interrogator play an “imitation game”. Turing asks, “What am I? Am I a person? Am I a machine? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?” He is of course a war hero but because of the secrecy code is unable to claim that title. He accepts hormonal castration treatment rather than a prison term.

Heroes or non-heroes? I suspect Richard Flanagan had that problem when he was writing The Narrow Road to the Deep North. After all, these were his father’s colleague’s notebooks, his father’s story. His father stayed alive, held on, until Richard said he had finished: a heroic act to protect his own history. Flanagan’s most authentic writing comes from that notebook source. Why did he want to make his hero a celebrated surgeon with an interest in the classics? Why did he have the character doing a “Up there Cazaly” leap in the school yard? And worse, why did he have Dorrigo Evans drive through a Tasmanian bushfire to save his long-suffering wife and children? The reader is given a yarn about a flawed hero who enjoys making love to women within some leftover haiku exploration. I would rather the non-hero scrounging for rice in the camps with his anus hanging out.