ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Shaena Lambert’s Radiance is a book from back in 2007, and I think I probably bought it on the recommendation of the late Kevin from Canada, a friend and blogger sorely missed.  It’s a thought-provoking novel, the kind I really like.

The novel traces the story of Keiko, a ‘Hiroshima Maiden’ and her ‘house mother’ Daisy Lawrence, but it’s also a devastating exposé of the way ordinary people are used to serve political purposes, no matter the pain it causes.  The Hiroshima Maidens were, in real life, Japanese girls with facial disfigurements caused by the atom bomb, who were brought to America for facial surgery to restore their appearance.  Keiko stays with Daisy and her husband Walter, an ‘all-American family’ living in the quiet anonymity of the suburbs – while the Hiroshima Project committee organises the speaking tour that Keiko will undertake after her surgery as a poster girl for the nuclear disarmament movement.  This is the period between the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and also the era of the Cold War: peace activists were urging an international ban on the development of nuclear weapons.  But as Daisy soon finds out, Keiko’s calm, polite mask conceals a young woman too traumatised by survivor guilt to share the ambiguous truth of her memories.

Radiance is also a novel about national guilt.  As Richard Flanagan recently pointed out in a documentary called Life After Death (which you can maybe still see on ABC iView), more people died building the infamous Burma Railway than at Hiroshima.  So it is instructive to see how different nations deal with guilt arising from acts of war.  It seems to me that Japan has felt very little of it and for all its wealth has done little to atone for what they did throughout Southeast Asia in WW2.  It also seems to me that the Coalition of the Willing (Australia included) has turned a blind eye to the human cost of its enterprise in the Middle East and the chaos it unleashed.  It is ironic that Germany, the pariah nation of the 20th century, is in the 21st century a model for compassion with its welcome to the Syrian refugees.

(You see, this is why Radiance is the kind of novel I like.  It makes me think.  I extrapolate from it, and consider how its meaning has resonance in our own time.  It adds to my knowledge of the world, of people, and of ideas.  You can see how the vacuous narcissism of Pond fares so very badly by comparison.)

But the devastation at Hiroshima aroused an uneasy sense of guilt in America and so the idea was born to ‘rescue’ the girls from their fate as unmarriageable women who must be hidden away.  (As this article shows, it was a project fraught with contradictions, yet we still see occasional examples of disabled war victims ‘rescued’ from their fate, though these days it is mostly children that we see paraded in the media.)  Lambert deftly shows the emptiness of life for childless Daisy in the fecund suburbs of postwar America, and late in the book we see the beginnings of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare.  But we also see the tragedy of a neighbour suffering what we now call postwar PTSD having to confront ‘the enemy’ in his own neighbourhood, and the residents’ fear that radiation sickness might be contagious.  Ignorant, yes, but what else would they be, at that time and in that place?  These ambiguities show the moral complexities of the situation.

The story is told from Daisy’s point-of-view by a well-disposed narrator who sees into her anxious heart. Her yearning to mother Keiko is contrasted with the diffidence of the committee that wants to use the young woman for their own ends, noble though those aims might be.  Daisy struggles to understand Keiko’s small betrayals (stealing things from the houses she visits) but she is also disconcerted by her own jealousy about her husband Walter’s easier relationship with Keiko.  She doesn’t know how to handle her friend Irene once she realises that Irene’s determination to use Keiko is going to rupture their friendship.  And the characterisation of the affection that binds Daisy and Walter’s marriage is superb: intense, troubled Daisy repressing herself because that is what’s expected, and Walter, offhand and cynical, fond but vaguely paternal.

Shaena Lambert has since published a collection of short stories called Oh, My Darling, but alas, no novels since this one.

Author: Shaena Lambert
Title: Radiance
Publisher: Virago UK, 2008
ISBN: 9781844080182
Source: Personal library

Available from Fishpond: Radiance