ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Georgina Harding is the author the Orange Prize shortlisted Painter of Silence (2012), and I have Kim from Reading Matters to thank for introducing me to this fine author.  The Gun Room (2016) is Harding’s fourth novel, and I have her Land of the Living (2018) on the TBR too.

I suppose we have the marketing department to thank for the misleading cover design.  There is a Japanese girl in the novel, and yes, she does travel on trains, and indeed it does rain a lot, but the book is actually about a traumatised young war photographer.  A cover design featuring him would probably attract a different sort of gung-ho readership, but that might be no bad thing since the book reveals the cost of war long after the last shot has been fired.

Anyway…

Jonathan has made his name and a lot of money out of his photographs of a war crime during the Vietnam War.  (The My Lai Massacre is never mentioned, but it would be in most readers’ minds, and those of us of a certain age will have vivid memories of the photos we saw at the time.) Jonathan was young and naïve and utterly unprepared for what he might see, but he manages to capture that same sense of shock and horror in one of the soldiers — who witnessed, and possibly participated in the atrocity.  Jonathan remains haunted by what he has seen, and abandoning his brother and widowed mother on the family farm in England, he travels in Asia, trying to exorcise his demons.

He fetches up in Tokyo, where the order and restraint and predictability of what he sees brings him some solace.  He gets work teaching English, and he meets a girl called Kumiko, who shows him the sights and introduces him to her family.  With whom he is careful not to mention that his father hated the Japanese because he had fought against them in Burma… where Kumiko’s grandfather was a soldier too.

In Painter of Silence, the main character is a deaf-mute, and there are many silences in this novel too.  There is a silence about how Jonathan’s father died, one which has never been resolved.  But the silence around which the plot revolves takes place when Jonathan sees the soldier of his famous photo — tall, blonde and noticeable as a foreigner among the crowds.  Without knowing why or having any kind of plan, he follows this man to a bar, and they get talking, but Jim does not know who Jonathan is or how his photo has affected his life back in America, where everyone knows that he was that soldier.  Both these men value the anonymity that they have in Tokyo where they do not speak the language, so awkward conversations about their past lives do not arise. Mirroring the reticence of Japanese society, these two characters have control over their past because they are foreigners. 

Jonathan self-censors his role in the famous photos and the men go on outings as a foursome (i.e. with Kumiko and a succession of Jim’s dates.)  A tentative friendship emerges until eventually the moment comes when Jonathan breaks his silence.

And of course Kumiko wants to know why.

The Gun Room tells this poignant story in an extended prose poem with little dialogue.  Harding writers in a painterly style:

The photographs travel the city.  At Shinjuku station people pass through smooth conduits, channelled between one action and the next.  Light shines equally off the hard surfaces of walls and floor and ceiling, and the moving people make soft-edged shadows where they go.  In Kanda, in the business district, two salarymen bow to one another in the street.  He photographs them from the side so that they appear like mirror reflections of themselves, in dress and position and in the identical briefcases they carry, and the image is repeated but broken and jumbled amongst all the other reflections in the glass of the building behind them.  In Akihabara, he photographs whole streets of electrical and camera stores, rising floor upon floor, graphic upon graphic, window displays stacked to the ceiling with hi-fis and speakers, streams of dark-haired men milling beneath.  (p.47)

Georgina Harding’s most recent novel is Harvest (2021).  By the sound of the description at Goodreads, it’s a sequel to events in The Gun Room, continuing the themes of hidden trauma and the inescapable reach of the past that feature in Land of the Living.

Author: Georgina Harding
Title: The Gun Room
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2016
Jacket design by Emma Ewbank
ISBN: 9781408869802, pbk., 211 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books $27.99