The old story is at once shocking and familiar to those, like novelist Stephen Daisley, who grew up in the decades immediately after World War II. We know about Crete, Egypt and Italy through images of paratroopers, mateship, people being shot and blown up filtered through black-and-white movies and Commando comics. Even those of us who never quite paid attention to all that recognise the stories within Daisley’s third novel. Recognition is one thing; Daisley’s greater achievement is to make us feel them.
Twins Roy and Tony Mitchell, serving in the Taranaki regiment on Crete, head off to a listening post as the Germans descend. Brothers don’t usually go forward together, but the Mitchells are effectively orphaned, with no one back home to grieve for them. When only Roy returns, he must carry on to Egypt, Italy and eventually home with the guilt of having left his brother behind.
The better-informed reader gets to follow Tony as a maimed prisoner, taken by ship and train to Silesia to wait for liberation, his ultimate fate dangling until the novel’s end. By this time, Roy has made it home to the “stolen land” the government gives to servicemen, a scrubby patch of Taranaki high country on which he’ll build for himself the austere hut and life outlined in the novel’s prologue.
Daisley declares this a work of imagination, but the combination of research and post-war osmosis pervades. “Captain Davin”, later to write the official New Zealand history of the Crete campaign, rates a few mentions, and others namechecked include John Mulgan, John A Lee, Peter Fraser, Monty, Kipp, Freyberg, Churchill. The soup of historic detail swirls throughout, at times too much, but it does reinforce the notion of collective memory. The offspring of one war, their father ruined by gas and Messines, Roy and Tony become the men of the next, all of whom on both sides are burdened by the earlier one.
War is hell, the mid-20th century a pit of trauma, and the isolated man in a hostile landscape is the essence of the great New Zealand novel. It’s well within the scope of an Australia-based, Kiwi-raised author with a military and backcountry background. A late-starting literary outsider whose first two novels each won a major award, one in Australia and one an Ockham, Daisley is more than up to the task of making the clichés live.
Battles proceed at unstinting pace, as reportage, stream-of-consciousness and poetry melting into each other. To convey the violence and gore, Daisley’s phrasing is often spare, staccato, clunky and tuned to give you goosebumps. He’s particularly good at finishing chapters with a gut-punch line. The chapter about a soldier who goes “hunting Germans” after his brother is killed, taking out three times as many as the citations will record, ends, “But they sent him back to New Zealand and he come right after a year or two”.
The course of the story is mixed up by vantage shifting between the brothers, traversing continents, throwing in set pieces like British colonial monsters and boorish, riot-starting Australians, and flashbacks to the Mitchell brothers’ rural childhood. It’s a very 20th-century novel in history, but also in its allusive modernism, echoing throughout with lines that nod lightly to Owen, Eliot, Bogle, even The World at War.
So much explicit information, but the story’s weight lies between the lines. Daisley leaves much unsaid, allowing for subtly more current interpretation. The power of this very good book is synthesising and restoring a fading knowledge we once carried, almost innately, at only a generation’s remove. Sentimentality and emotion are reserved; the overwhelming mood is respect and remembrance.
