Book review: Catherine McKinnon is a writer of some prominence in Australia, having been shortlisted for various awards, including the Miles Franklin, for her second novel, Storyland. This is her third, an enormously ambitious novel with a wide geographical scope and gigantic cast.
Lotte Wyld is an Australian nurse serving in New Guinea. She and her colleagues minister to ailing allied soldiers as they fight the Japanese in the closing years of World War II. McKinnon’s introduction is clever, the language mimicking gunfire, rapid, to the point: “Someone shot a pig, she hears. Probably stole a pig, she thinks. Cook grunts hello. She’s grateful he treats her like everyone else. Counts it as respect.”
Danger lurks everywhere, not only from the enemy but the servicemen and officers. Morphine is filched from supplies and nurses are assaulted, including Lotte.
Nesse, a New Zealand nurse, helps keep them safe by teaching knife-throwing, a skill learnt from her parents who perform the act in a circus. Nesse has a working knowledge of te reo, which comes in handy for the names of bird species. Her nationality is also useful, with the author taking obvious relish in an exchange between Lotte and a soldier patient: “By the way, don’t tease Ness about how she says fish, she’s heard it too often and is likely to give you a whack round the ears.”
Cyril smiles. “Those New Zealanders always take the bait.”
The New Guinea chapters focus mostly on Lotte and her childhood friend and sweetheart Virgil, who carries The Aeneid in his pack through the jungle. Theirs is a wartime romance besieged by difficult circumstances and the mystery of his failure to protect her when they were teenagers.
Action moves back and forth from Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer works on the “gadget” he hopes will end war forever. McKinnon shows us not only Oppenheimer and his troubled, bored wife Kitty, but also hordes of scientists and technicians, particularly Mim, who knows herself to have a “rapacious sexual appetite” and also that she’s “super intelligent”. Her good friend Fred Johnson, like many Johnsons, is not really a Johnson, but uses that bland and ubiquitous name as a cover, in his case to hide his Jewish identity.
Shorter, dialogue-heavy chapters take us to Nagasaki, where people go about their daily lives: grandmothers love their granddaughters, fishermen fish, monks man their temples and children write to their fathers away fighting. These chapters are more impressionistic than those that take place in New Guinea or Los Alamos, and it is tempting to gloss over them.
When the end comes, with the Nagasaki bomb, McKinnon embarks on an exhaustive list: “Everything is gone. Hiroko is gone, Oki is gone, Father is gone, sister-in-law is gone, the house is gone and down at the school, the schoolchildren are gone, Yumi and her cousin with them, all gone, the teachers are gone, the buildings are gone …”
Throughout the novel, character after character is named and introduced. When a character is named and details given of their personality or appearance, the reader engages with them. If a further draft of the novel had been written, McKinnon might have been advised to shorten descriptions of less significant characters.
Idiomatic expressions among the soldiers are generally true, although the use of “shit stirrer” and others are from later in the 20th century. There are some stand-out passages, particularly of the successful bomb test, seen through Oppenheimer’s eyes, and the scene of Lotte’s revenge.
The horror of the New Guinea war, where hand-to-hand fighting was the norm, is graphically described. The final scene, at war’s end, while the waiata Now Is The Hour is sung in English and Māori, is beautifully affecting.
World War II remains a favourite topic for writers. To Sing of War gives us a closely researched and heartfelt portrayal of the war as it was, fought closer to home.
