Books |
The Daughters of Mars
Thomas Keneally
By
Published: Mar 26, 2014
Category:
Fiction
Guest Butler Nora Levine has a fondness for mysteries — like In the Woods and Maisie Dobbs — by authors who are unknown to me. And she has the stamina to read books that are long and worthy, like this novel, which tops 500 pages. She’s a Superior Being.
“It’s often unexpected people who do the housekeeping of humanity,” Thomas Keneally said in an interview about his latest novel, “The Daughters of Mars.”
“The housekeeping of humanity” — a phrase so slim and graceful it is easy to overlook the weight it carries.
Naomi and Sally Durance are sisters, born and raised on a farm north of Sydney, Australia. They are near in age, they resemble each other, they’re both unmarried, both nurses. For all that, they are not close.
Each sister, for singular reasons, answers a call from their government for military nurses. It is 1915, and Australia, having been an independent nation for only fifteen years, is an eager and committed ally to the British Empire in the war effort.
We are probably most familiar with Australia’s connection to WWI in the context of the tragic events of Gallipoli. “The Daughters of Mars” reckons with the high cost of Gallipoli and other battles across Europe, but from a different perspective. [To buy the novel from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The novel traces the war as Sally and Naomi and the other volunteer nurses take their first steps onto the hospital ship Archimedes, are trained in Egypt, and work on board ship in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, on the island of Lemnos, and on the battlefields of France. Keneally escorts us into the story in a similarly direct fashion — he introduces us to the sisters during a difficult period in their lives, follows them on board the Archimedes, and doesn’t look back.
These young and naïve volunteers were unprepared for the sights of the Pyramids of Giza, much less the challenges that were carried in on battlefield stretchers: the shell-shocked faces of teenage boys, the amputations, the newly blinded, the sepsis, the sheer volume of wounded, nearly dead and dying. Over the course of the war and the nurses’ support of the men it tried to claim, an understanding of “the housekeeping of humanity” is revealed.
“Where are you from, Sister?” a pale older man with a chest wound demanded, looking up above his bandages for an announcement of the place name that might save him. There were more of such older men — men who had known labor and had been aged and hollowed by it — than she would have thought. Knowing by now that men were solaced by this plain geography game, Sally told him. The idea was this, so it seemed: while I am from one quiet shire and you from another, no harm will approach us. Those who discussed locations could not die. But she knew now there was no dealing with the thoracic wound. The victim and the nurses must accommodate themselves to it. It would accommodate no one.
What I have come to think of as duality of fate runs below the surface of the novel, and it is movingly brought to the surface in the final chapter. Two sisters are from and in similar circumstances, but their experiences are separate and profoundly different. And without divulging plot the question of “what if…” is a constant. I’m not even clear it was the author’s deliberate intent, but it does resonate. War is so much about time and place and the inability to protect one’s destiny. Change doesn’t happen just in the big moments, but also in the small ones. It occurs in an instant, but its effects can be forever.
The novel’s tone is measured, respectful, almost elegiac. It is well paced and steady, even in the heat of battles as they are witnessed and felt firsthand in the hospital wards and through dangers and near misses, small and large. The thunder of the bombs, the distance from anything familiar, the heat, the cold, the injured, the disease, the dead. If you are willing to commit the time (it wasn’t a short war, and it’s not a short novel), this book and what it shows us of that war will soak into your bones for a good long while.
