Saturday 30 December 2017

The Water Beetles


I'm watching the beetle. Not the beetle I wish I was, but the bigger one who wants to kill it. Mine is golden-green, small and easy to spot. Just behind it is the larger one with a shiny, deep-black carapace, so black it seems to drink the light right from my eyes. The big one hasn't struck mine yet, it's only watching, and it tastes the air ahead to see when it should act. I can see it will strike and win, and the beetle I wish I was will die. Like everyone else, it is at war, which means its every move is inevitable and prescribed.
The Water Beetles reminded me of The Narrow Road to the Deep North: like Richard Flanagan before him, author Michael Kaan took his father's real-life account of harrowing experiences during WWII, and by crafting a narrative that dips in and out of the timeline of an entire life, Kaan is able to show how such early experiences shape, and wound, a person forever. As a meditation on memory and personhood, I found The Water Beetles to be serious and deep. As a WWII story that I hadn't heard before, I found it to be informative and gripping. What more could I have asked for?
Looking back into the past is a lonely game of self-delusion, watching people and events move with an inevitability that never was. The history books tell everything with such certainty. But at the time, nothing seemed inevitable to me. Some things were impossible or unlikely, some things expected, but most of all, beyond the routine of daily life, the world was a mystery. We knew little until it happened.
In the opening scene, the narrator, twelve-year-old Chung-Man, is on a forced march with some of his family members; weary, starving, and in constant fear of the Japanese soldiers with their guns and bamboo switches. After this brief opener, the story rewinds to introduce Chung-Man as a child of privilege; a rich man's son living in Hong Kong, with maids and a driver, a tailor dressing the boy for British-styled private school. We meet the entire family over the next several chapters, always having in mind which of them were POWs in the opening scene, and there's a satisfying narrative tension as the reader wonders what happened to everyone else. As the narrative also jumps ahead to Chung-Man's present and stories from his adult life, there are hints about who will survive (including, obviously, Chung-Man himself), and this doesn't lessen the tension: I needed to know how everyone mentioned got from there to here. As the Japanese invade Hong Kong, I was fascinated by the British army's fast capitulation of its colony (but, to be fair, I hear they were otherwise engaged by the war), and as Chung-Man is led into hiding in the Chinese countryside, I was riveted by how easy it seemed to be for Japan to bomb and march their way to a seemingly unopposed victory over the much larger country. I didn't know much of anything about this history, and this story was an education. (As per Flanagan's book, the Japanese soldiers are particularly cruel to their POWs – I cringed at scenes of stragglers being shot in the head; starving children forcing down spoiled food; women hiding in the stinking latrine from the midnight visits of their drunken captors.)
Knowing I'll die soon doesn't bother me. There's too much to be unburdened of, the indignity and pain. The fact is that the long contest against death is relatively easy; you win every day, no matter how, until you lose. You know who holds the prize each night when you hit that pillow.

What troubles me is the struggle to stay continuous, to be a single person over time. How can I be certain it was really me who emerged from the boy in the horse farm, or from the one who carried the buckle? He doesn't feel like the same person sometimes. Part of me is still back there, looking into the future as a mystery instead of the crumbling pile it is to me now.
And The Water Beetles would have been a worthy read if it were only a history lesson, but the older Chung-Man's philosophising about the perceived inconstancy of personhood over a lifetime really affected me; Kaan captures something unique and important with these bits. I wouldn't have picked this up if it hadn't been a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and having now read it, I'm surprised it didn't win; at a minimum, it deserves to be more widely read.


The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:


Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.
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