Set against the backdrop of a Japanese internment camp in country Victoria toward the end of World War II, My Beautiful Enemy is the second novel by award winning Brisbane author Cory Taylor.
Through the eyes of nineteen-year-old Arthur Wheeler, who resides as a guard in the camp, we are taken on a journey starting with his violent upbringing; his ‘relationship’ with his neighbour Bill; his unrequited love for Stanley Ueno a young Japanese ‘enemy alien’; and his failed marriages.
From the first words, Arthur’s retrospective examination his life is filled with melancholia, regret and despondence:
Everyone has dreams about the life they might have led. For years I mourned the life I could have shared with Stanley if only the times had been different. I blamed my unhappiness on the war, and then I blamed it on my wives. Now I see that I was unhappy for the same reasons that everyone else, at one time or another, is unhappy. We define ourselves by what we do not have, by the people we are not, and we do this because we must.
We are also reminded of our own missed opportunities or unrequited loves which may have passed us by, or the illusions of ‘what if?’
Arthur cannot forget his time in the camp nor the moment Stanley came into his life. Arthur’s obsession with the past determines his fate, but it also drives him forward. When he finds out about Stanley’s deportation back to Japan there is no turning back: ‘I drove for two days… I wasn’t journeying in real time so much as spiralling in inner space, returning again and again to the same moments from my past.’
Taylor has really challenged herself with this novel. Not only has she written about an earlier period in Australian history, but she has also written about a traditionally masculine topic from a female perspective. One feels Arthur’s anguish, his rush of excitement at the thought of Stanley and the disillusionment of May, his first wife. However, there is, at times a stilted style to her dialogue, especially between the young Australian soldiers. Lines such as: ‘I was going to offer you that lovely virgin with the big knockers’ does not sound like something young Aussie blokes from the 1940s would really say.
Unrequited love, alienation, disillusionment and a repressed sexual desire propel Arthur’s journey forward and form the basis of Taylor’s intimate novel. My Beautiful Enemy is beautifully written and measuredly paced, and will not disappoint.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Beautiful Enemy
By Cory Taylor
Softcover
272 pages
RRP: $29.99
ISBN: 9781922079893
Text Publishing
