Featherston, early 1943. In the nearby POW camp there's increasing friction between Japanese prisoners and Kiwi guards. For the former, captivity is a shame that can never be expunged. Their captors, aware of the brutal treatment meted out to Allied prisoners, show little sympathy or comprehension.
Violence flickers.
There are rumours of hidden weapons, assassination plots against New Zealand personnel. Work parties refuse to co-operate; guards are taunted and respond with bayonet "prickings". Suicide, self-harm and confrontations increase.
On the morning of February 25, prisoners charge the barbed wire. The guards open fire. Inside a minute, scores of Japanese lie dead or dying.
Eighteen months later, it happensagain in rural New South Wales. Hundreds of Japanese overwhelm and kill guards, breaking out into the surrounding countryside. In a few hours of bloodshed and during the manhunt which follows, more than 200 of them die.
This is the catastrophe towards which Keneally's's 30th work of fiction builds. We meet the town of Gawell, where no one locks their doors, farmworkers live in corrugated-iron shacks, kids stay four years at high school only if they want a bank job, and where a Sunday sermon condemns the moral turpitude of American films.
We meet the protagonists. Alice lives her "life of near-drudgery" as farm missus.
Her short-term husband is held by the Germans; the arrival as workhand of slim-hipped Italian prisoner Giancarlo points to an affair of positively domestic contentment.
Then there's Tengo, an austere young pilot shot down by an enemy he knows are his inferiors, placed in a captivity he can't accept.
There's the Australian Major and radio serial writer; the female impersonator; the Senior Sergeant whose life will be shaped by sustained deceit.
