KEY POINTS:
At first glance Radiance looks like a fairly standard period novel set in the 1950s. Keiko is a young Hiroshima survivor with disfiguring facial scars who goes to the United States for plastic surgery and stays with a childless white suburban couple.
The book seems clunky with the cliches you'd expect from something set in "the golden age" of the American dream: a depressed barren housewife, a creatively blocked blacklisted screenwriter with lingering leftist sentiments, an ambitious but cold journalist.
While reading the first chapters I was overcome with a sense of foreboding that the big climax Lambert was building up to was that "50s America wasn't that great a place after all." Having seen key cinema classics like Back to the Future, I would have found this finale less than gripping.
Luckily, the book goes elsewhere. Not that Lambert doesn't show a lot of dislike for 50s America. The books themes are a good deal broader though, thanks partly to the fact that, although the story is told from the point of view of the host mother, the main character is Keiko herself. The story probes the struggle of this outsider with her own identity and with the trauma she suffers from having been bombed in her homeland by her host nation.
Unfortunately for Keiko, her sponsors have cast her in a role designed to get publicity for their cause. Just in case we are tempted to demonise them, however, we need to note that this cause is nuclear disarmament, as admirable as anyone could hope for. We see Keiko only from outside but the plot of the book takes place inside her head. This can be frustrating at times but frustrating in an authentic way. How often do the most important events in our lives occur inside the heads of our peers?
It is tempting to say that despite its anachronistic setting, Radiance is a novel well suited to our times, preoccupied as it is with issues of identity, self-knowledge and personal trauma. But at the risk of sounding overdramatic, those are conflicts so tied up with human nature and experience as to be timeless. Which means that Radiance is a book that will hold its appeal long after horror about Hiroshima and fascination with the 50s have faded. And that is as neat a definition as any of a good book.
- Virago, $36.99
* Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington novelist and historian.
