Alone, Dominique arrives at a deserted beach in a remote part of Iceland. She wants to document the Ormen that was shipwrecked in the 1970s before the coastguard arrives at the end of the month to haul the wreck into the sea. She sets up camp inside the ship, but soon disturbing dreams make her awake suddenly, singing drifts through the ship, and in the distance along the beach she is sure there is a woman scantily clad in a dress even though it is below zero. These are images from 1901 when the Ormen, then a whaling ship, left Dundee. Later her visions are from when the Ormen was used as an Arctic research vessel in the 1970s.
Lily’s older confident sister, Maya shrugs off the past whenever Lily tries to remember their childhood in Hong Kong before they were sent back to their father in London once their mother, Sook-Yin’s died. Lily learns that she is has been bequeathed a large amount of money on the condition she comes to Hong Kong to claim it. She has no idea who Hei-Fong Lee is nor why he would leave her so much money. When she learns her sister has received the same letter, she confronts Maya, but her sister says to ignore the offer.
Reviews from the Guardian and the Times referred to this novel as “often funny” and crediting the story with “tremendous imagination.” I couldn’t disagree more. It appeared as if these reviewers knew nothing about Sri Lankan history because there was nothing funny about thousands of bodies hacked to pieces so they couldn’t be identified and dumped into a Colombo lake. Nor anything imaginative about these facts because that’s what they were—historical facts. What was clever about Karunatalaka’s writing was that Almeida, his main character is killed, and oversees these crimes as a ghost thereby telling the tale from an omnipotent viewpoint.
Uncle Louis is sent with Theo and Pauline from Shanghai by the Deng family to start an antique business in Paris. He plans to arrange his son, Theo’s marriage and set him up in the business so he can return to China. But Theo manages to delay the arranged marriage first by further education, then finally by working as an interpreter for the British during WW1. When Pauline learns her uncle’s first wife is arranging her marriage, she is desperate to find her cousin to help her convince her uncle not to send her back to China. She rushes to Noyelles where Theo has been working with Chinese labourers but is distressed and fearful by what she discovers.
Every Janie Chang book I’ve read has been a five out of five. This one delves into a neglected part of World War1’s history that I had never read about which is seen through the eyes of its main characters—Theo and Pauline Deng and their friend Henri Liu, a Chinese journalist.
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