Fall of Giants, or How to Fit an Entire War in 1000 Pages

One of the reasons that I love historical fiction is that, when well researched and written, it allows me to learn something without actually have to read a history book.  I guarantee that reading the Little House books by Laura Ingals Wilder in elementary school taught me more about pioneer life than anything in my social studies book.  Same with Tudor England-almost anything I know about Henry VIII, his wives, and the various Thomases in his life is the result of the many, many fictional narratives I have read through the years.  It may not be "hard, academic" fact, but then is any history hard academic fact?  After all, it tends to be written by the victors, as they say.

Ken Follet is the master of the sweeping historical novel.  In Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, he showed us the world of 12th and 13th century England in detail both large and small.  World events intermingle with the day to day lives of the people to create a rich tapestry of story and feeling.  As such, I picked up the audiobook of Fall of Giants knowing that I was going to get a great story with interesting characters, and that I would learn an awful lot in the process. (Plus, it is 30 hours long-30 HOURS!  Talk about getting your money's worth for an audiobook)

Fall of Giants tells the story of World War I through the eyes of characters from various places in the social and political hierarchies.  There is Lord Fitzherbert, a wealthy aristocrat and his sister Maud, a feminist and suffragist.  There is Ethel, Fitzherbert's maid, and her brother Billy, who enters the coal mines at age 13.  In Russia we have Grigori and Lev Peshkov, brothers who are trying to escape the tyranny of the czar and find a better life in America.  There is the German Walter Von Ulrich, a friend of Fitz's from school, and Gus Dewar, an American working in Wilson's White House.  As the characters wend their way through events great and small, connections are made and people are drawn into situations both triumphant and tragic.

Follett obviously researched his little heart out for this book, which comes in at a staggering 985 pages.  As in his other books, he related important world events through the eyes of his major characters, of whom there are many.  And as usual, he created compelling personal stories for each character, heroes and villains alike.  He uses Earl Fitzherbert to show the conservatism and entrenched sense of privilege in the English noble class.  He uses Maud and Ethel to showcase the cause of first wave feminism and the suffrage movement.  Grigori and Lev live in a Russia that is cruel and repressive-and about to change the course of the world through the Bolshevik Revolution.  Gus Dewar represents the rising power of the United States in world affairs.  And Walter Von Ulrich is anything but a villain, though he is the "enemy"-he is handled with the most nuanced care by Follett, representing a younger, more progressive Germany fighting against the old guard in the cause of peace, even as he fights as a soldier on the front lines.

If that sounds like a lot to keep up with, it is.  And this is supposed to be just the first in a trilogy!  There is enough information in this book to make a trilogy of its own.  And that length is my only complaint.  I am not afraid of lengthy books-Under the Dome by Stephen King was one of my favorites last year-but the sheer amount of detail in this novel is at times slightly overwhelming.  While the personal stories of the characters are fairly easy to keep straight, I sometimes found my mind drifting through the the pages and pages of minute detail about specific battles and political machinations.  In fact, listening to it rather than reading it is likely the main reason I finished it.  I suspect that fatigue would have set in, and I would have put it aside to read something else, sure I would get back to it-which is something I rarely manage to do.  That said, I am glad that I stuck with it on my daily commute.  I fell in love with some of the characters as much as I despise others, and I am looking forward to seeing where their lives go, and where the fate of the world goes, in the next (I'm sure, hefty) installment.

What is it About Islands?

I have always wanted to live in an island.  Maybe it's longing for the sea while living in the middle of the country, or wanting to be set apart from the rest of the world, but I have often thought with longing about a small house overlooking the sea, reached only by boat.  I've always thought Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard (I am a New England girl by temperament if not by birth), but after reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Anne Shaffer, I think that the Channel Islands might be a good choice as well.

The novel is told through letters and telegrams between Juliet Ashton and various residents of the island of Guernsey in the months after the end of World War II.  The Channel Islands were occupied by Germany during the war, and the residents were completely cut off from the rest of England.  For five years they had no news about what was happening in the rest of the world-no newspapers, no radios, no letters from family or from their children, who they sent to the mainland before the invasion.  One night, after dining on a forbidden pig with friends, a group of islanders was caught out after curfew.  On the spot, one brave young woman, Elizabeth, created a fictional literary society to explain why they were out together.  In order to put the truth to their lie, the small group of friends created an actual book club, and their meetings allowed many of the members to keep their sanity in the midst of war.  Years later, one of the members contacts Juliet Ashton, a journalist and author, to say how much he enjoyed a book that once belonged to her that he found in a used book shop.  Their correspondence leads Juliet to the island, and to a story both tragic and triumphant of love and friendship in a time of war.

I started out thinking that I was not going to love this book.  I am not that fond of epistolary novels, and the last one I read (check out my not-so glowing review of Between Friends) was so bad that I almost put this book back down once I'd picked it up.  But after resisting the pull of the story for 50 pages or so, I was drawn completely into the lives of the characters.  Juliet reminded me of a character from a period mystery I read recently (this time a glowing review of A Duty to the Dead)-a spunky, scrappy, snarky, but ultimately kind and loving young woman.  And I think that the reason that this worked where Between Friends did not is because each of the letter writers had such a distinctive voice.  Despite everything being told second hand, the novel felt very intimate and personal, and I felt like the character development was pretty good.  But what really made the novel work for me was the historical events it was based on.

I knew that the Channel Islands were occupied during WWII, and I already had some vague idea about their relation to France and England politically (which is to say, they "belong" to England but have their own government, a bit like Puerto Rico, I suppose).  But this novel filled in some details in my admittedly sketchy picture of that period in British history.  And like any good historical novel, it led me to do some more reading and research on the topic.  Rather than using lots of long exposition to provide background, the stories of the islanders comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of Juliet's relationship with them, and the novel feels light and easy to read, while at the same time having some substance-not an easy balance to maintain, but one that Burrows and Shaffer pull off rather well.

When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka

When the Emperor was Divine is a little gem of a book.  A slim 160 pages, Otsuka's debut novel tells the story of a Japanese family forced into an internment camp in 1942.  Each of the five chapters is narrated by a different member of the family-the mother, who packs away the house and their old life after the relocation order came down; the daughter, who tells of the journey on the train to the Utah desert; the son, who describes life in the camp; and the father, who was arrested and held in a separate facility for the duration of the war and returns to his family a different man.  The characters are nameless, which I assume is a purposeful attempt to portray the family as representatives of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were "relocated" during World War II. 

Otsuka's writing is spare, but conveys such emotion.  This family lived in an America where their neighbors turned against them, or, worse, pretended they no longer existed.  Their ties to the community where they lived and worked and went to school are suddenly severed, and it is apparent that everyone was too afraid of being seen as disloyal to stand up for anyone-themselves or their neighbors.  There were two parts of the novel that stood out for me.  The first was when the mother was packing up their house in order to evacuate.  From my place in the 21st century I knew there was a good chance that no matter what she did to safeguard her family's things, they would not be there when and if she returned.  But the most painful part was when she killed the family dog, because he was old and sick and there was no one to take care of him.  The second part that struck me was the son's description of his mother's slow slide into depression and hopelessness.  They say that children are adaptable, and in fact the boy never seemed to lose hope that they wold eventually go home.  But even his youthful innocence could not spare him from watching his mother wither and lose interest in the world and what would happen to them.

Finally, after more than three years of imprisonment, the internment camp inmates were given $25, put on buses, and taken back to their hometowns.  Many had no actual homes to return to, and no family or friends to help them.  The opportunistic lawyers and businessmen who promised to collect rents from the people living in their houses or running their businesses had disappeared, along with the money they had promised to keep safe.  No on apologized, or offered any compensation for their losses-but really, how can you compensate someone for their quality of life, for the loss of feeling safe and secure in your own home?  And their neighbors, out of shame or anger, shunned them, which must have felt like a different kind of imprisonment.  Otsuka does a wonderful job bringing her readers into this shameful era of American history.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a novel of world war two as experienced by Henry, a Chinese-American boy, and Keiko, his Japanese-American first love.  IN 1942 Seatle, Henry and his family live in the Chinatown section of the International District.  Keiko and her family live in Nihonmachi, the Japanese section.  Henry's father, born in China, is a fierce Chinese nationalist, with a hatred of all things Japanese because of their invasion of China.  He tries to instill this hatred in Henry, but all Henry can see is how his obsession with the war in China keeps them from developing a real relationship.  Keiko is a second generation American who doesn't even speak Japanese.  Henry and Keiko meet and strike up their friendship as the only two Asian students at an elite prep school.  Because they are on scholarship, they are made to work in the kitchen, serving the white students their lunch.  Their shared "otherness" bonds them in a way that simple friendship can't describe.  Henry is devastated when the order comes from President Roosevelt to inter all Japanese-American or not-in camps well inland.  Henry promises to wait for Keiko, but his father, who mostly disowned Henry after discovering he had a Japanese friend, intercepts Henry's letters to Keiko, and her letters from the camp, and they grow apart.  In 1986, Henry, now in his 50s, finds himself drawn back to the Panama Hotel, where the discovery of items left behind by Japanese families on their way to internment camps brings his old feelings to the surface.

I'm feeling lukewarm about this book.  On the one hand, it brings a new perspective to the history of Japanese internment, with its focus on the interplay between Chinese and Japanese, and how Chinese American's had to identify themselves so as not to be mistaken for Japanese, since most Americans of the time (and probably still) couldn't or didn't care to understand the differences.  On the other hand, it felt like stories I had read before, most notably Snow Falling on Cedars, about a white boy falling in live with a Japanese girl, and the ways that the community responded to the internment of their neighbors.

That said, I was moved by the story, and horrified as always by the way that fear and false patriotism were used to justify the blatant racism of the era.  Since 9-11 I have watched in dismay the way that Muslims have been treated in some parts if the country, and I sometimes think it is only our shameful history of Japanese internment that has kept detention centers and mass deportation from becoming a reality.    I don't know whether this particular novel does much to add to that conversation that has not already been said, but it was an enjoyable read.