Maxine Hong Kingston: The Fifth Book of Peace

Reviewed by PHILIPPA JAMIESON

This is a book to read in large chunks - a few pages before bed makes it hard to get into. Don't expect a plot. Don't expect a novel, or autobiography, or memoir - it's the Chinese form of "talk-story", a collage of mythical, real and imaginary worlds.

Maxine Hong Kingston searches in vain for the lost books of peace of Chinese mythology. Did they really exist? She writes her own - The Fourth Book of Peace - but it's burned to ashes in a bushfire that devastates her house, so she writes this, The Fifth Book of Peace.

After this memoir-type opening, the author switches to a novella embedded in the middle of the book, set during the Vietnam War. Chinese American Wittman Ah Sing leaves California for Hawaii to dodge the draft, accompanied by his wife and son. How can he kill, let alone people who look like him?

Through Wittman's hippie idealist eyes, in a stream-of-consciousness style, we see the interracial relationships in his new neighbourhood, peace demonstrations, and a church sanctuary for Vietnam deserters.

Then the book flips back to memoir: Kingston leads writing workshops for war veterans, incorporating meditation. This choppy, diary-like section is peppered with outpourings from the vets trying to come to terms with their traumatic experiences years after the events.

The book culminates in a television crew filming the author at the village where Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh lives and teaches. The author writes: "I wanted the BBC to show the world a multicultural, multiracial America. Every time we go to war, we're in schizophrenic agony. Whoever the enemy is, they're related to us." There are brief references to the war in Iraq, September 11, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but here Vietnam is the symbol for the universal experience of war.

The sentiments are laudable, but this rambling, 400-page treatise loses momentum, and lost my interest. A more severe edit would have eliminated repetition and the dross of detail.

Secker & Warburg, $34.95

* Philippa Jamieson is a Dunedin freelance writer.