Nominated for the 2021 Booker Prize.
In 1943 on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, a Japanese officer beheads Hugh Rand, an Australian spy — a coast watcher. The spectators include villagers he terrorized as his mind frayed under the stress of pursuit by soldiers and their hounds. Rand’s influence transcends his death. For decades he plagues characters who strive to cope with him and one another in New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, Australia and Japan. Who misperceives? Lies? Self-destructs? Suffers? Loves? The layers unfold as the author entices us through cultural, historical and intellectual curtains, deep into minds and relationships disturbed by the Pacific war and Rand’s legacy.
By Susan Blumberg-Kason, 31 October 2020
When Australian Hugh Rand sailed to New Guinea in 1943 to serve as a coast watcher for the Allied Forces, he knew he would be killed. Rand’s job was to alert the Allies of Japanese activity on the island. He befriended local villagers, but never knew whom he could trust. And as predicted, he was beheaded by the Japanese not long after he arrived. In Death of Coast Watcher by Anthony English, Hugh Rand went on to terrorize generations after him.
The novel can be described as what one would call an “epic saga”; it takes place in New Guinea, Australia, the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), and Japan over four decades. It’s unusual for English novels to take place in these faraway Pacific islands and the setting makes for a good story, especially one centered around a lonely coast watcher.
A few minutes before sunset, when mellow light still gleamed into the cell through the tiny eastern window, mosquitoes launched from the roof of thatch to attack Rand in squadrons of buzz and jab, the drill of a mad dentist. Ten or so days ago he relied on loathed mosquitoes to keep him awake and alert. Now he wanted them to inflict mild pain and annoyance to distract him from the mental and physical fruits of torture. This evening the mosquitoes were more frenzied than ever.
Rand was a loner and a perfect candidate for a coast watcher; he had no dependents or spouse. After he was executed, his mother was driven to insanity and his father suffered for years after that. And it seemed that everyone who was connected with his case suffered, too.
The people and the missionaries were wrong. The nasty spirits of ancestors and places and things were real and there was no escape from them. Jesus and his enemy, Satan, were added to the many hundreds of spirits that lived among us here, not in some other place like heaven or hell. They could punish us now and after we died.
Bos Simeon was a teenager in Bougainville, New Guinea, where Rand was posted. Even though she survived the war, her parents did not. [Inadvertent spoiler removed] So Bos had plenty of reason to block out the war. And she was fairly successful until Peter and Charlotte Millar arrived in New Guinea in the early 1970s from Australia. Charlotte was a linguist and learned the local language. But Peter, who was posted to Bougainville as a civil servant, became obsessed with Rand. This obsession started to invade his marriage and his interactions with the villagers. He pestered Bos so much that she started to relive the horrors from the war, even after Peter and Charlotte moved on to the Gilbert Islands.
The last part of the book took place in Kyoto [Inadvertent spoiler removed]. She inadvertently walked into the studio of Hiroyuki Ayanokoji, a Japanese academic who kept terrible secrets about the war in New Guinea and in northeast China.
Throughout the story, English tackles tough questions about war. Is it worse for Japan to ignore its war record or for many of the Allied countries to write fake histories, all while annihilating the people who originally occupied the land? Ayanokoji spoke at length with Charlotte about these blurred boundaries. He wondered how the Japanese could be blamed for conducting ghastly experiments on unsuspecting Chinese residents, while the Americans have never been criticized for the way they handled the discovery of these experiments.
The Americans offered immunity from war crimes prosecution, and promised generous living allowances to these sadists, the same sadists who killed 400 murata after Japan’s surrender.
[Paragraph removed owing to inadvertent spoilers]
English blends island folklore into his portrayal of an area torn apart by a war that reached far and wide, including places like New Guinea. The question at the end of the book is whether those who survived will ever cease to be haunted by the war. And how many generations will it take to repair the damage?
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Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong.
Death of a Coast Watcher is a gripping and ambitious novel that ranges across time and space, exploring the distant ramifications of a seemingly minor act of violence on a remote island during WWII. Deeply atmospheric and with a firm command of local cultures, it plays with the misunderstandings that form part of all human relationships and lays them bare as key to the human condition itself. By creating imaginative worlds pictured through different voices, it resonates with narrative power and is beautifully written and orchestrated with a firm authorial hand.
Nigel Barley, anthropologist, and author of Island of Demons and many other works of fiction and non-fiction.
After an incredible opening and a brutal account from WWII New Guinea, readers are kept guessing as to where they will go next in the islands of the Pacific. They are then spun sideways to Australia and to Japan to revisit the scene of wartime crimes. Anthony English delves into his time working in the Pacific to bring alive places we can only imagine. He almost teaches you to speak Pidgin and then segues, in the next chapter, into Japanese culture with an insight into classic photography. I found myself on a complex journey that I did not want to stop."
Tim Page, Goodreads author and celebrated Vietnam War photojournalist.
One of the pleasures of a blog like mine is that sometimes there is an opportunity to introduce a really fine work of fiction to readers who might otherwise never get to hear about it. The debut novel Death of a Coast Watcher by Australian author Anthony English has been positively reviewed by The Asian Review of Books but it’s published by a small publisher in the UK which doesn’t have much exposure here in Australia.
This is the blurb:
In 1943 on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, a Japanese officer beheads Hugh Rand, an Australian spy — a coast watcher. The spectators include villagers he terrorised as his mind frayed under the stress of pursuit by soldiers and their hounds. Rand’s influence transcends his death. For decades he plagues characters who strive to cope with him and one another in New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, Australia and Japan. Who misperceives? Lies? Self-destructs? Suffers? Loves? The layers unfold as the author entices us through cultural, historical and intellectual curtains, deep into minds and relationships disturbed by the Pacific war and Rand’s legacy.
What kind of man is willing to be despatched from Australia onto an island occupied by the Japanese in WW2, where the local people are possibly more loyal to the Japanese than to Australia? Australia had held the mandate for the Territory of New Guinea since the defeat of Germany in WW1 but there was no certainty that the locals were willing to risk their lives to enable an Australian coast-watcher to send radio reports about Japanese troop movements.
Such a man must surely be brave, and so he is in the shocking first chapter of Death of a Coast Watcher. Hugh Rand, formerly a colonial administrator on New Ireland but now landed covertly on Bougainville to monitor Japanese activity, initially arouses the reader’s admiration for his courage under Japanese torture and for the manner of his beheading. Very soon, however, the reader is trapped into confronting a back story that shows him to be cruel, violent, racist and misogynistic. Charlotte Millar, whose husband in the 1970s is obsessed with Rand’s story, reads a witness account and comes to this conclusion:
"From Bos’s encounters with him and her description of the execution, including the dynamics of the severed head, Charlotte now discerned a shortish, awkward man with sandy hair; his distinctive clothing tattered and stained; awful injuries and much blood. No voice or face but aspects of his individuality rammed into her brain, where he registered pride, intelligence, fortitude, fearlessness; and the personality of a psychopath to rival the Japanese officer and his dogs." (p.183)
The power of this novel arises from the way narrators undermine the testimony that has gone before, in order to establish that, sometimes, it’s just not possible to find out what happened. Rand’s story, narrated from a 3rd person limited point-of-view, tells us not only what he did, but also about his bizarre motivations and about his obsessive preoccupation with being in control. An alternative story comes in 1971, from the narrative of a young Indigenous woman called Bos Simeon. She is pressured incessantly to retrieve memories she would rather forget, and she tells a different story about Rand’s presence on Bougainville. Peter Millar, reading Charlotte’s translation of Bos’s Pidgin English, says it could be a fabrication, and that they should read it as one of several possible stories. What Peter doesn’t know is that Charlotte, for her own neurotic reasons, has embellished the text, and made excisions too.
On a break back in Australia Peter visits Brooksbank, Rand’s Commanding Officer, now a very old man. He undercuts the narrative again, hinting that there’s more to the story but he won’t ever tell. Charlotte, ever the cynic, thinks that he’s glorifying the banal with mystery.
Charlotte is a difficult character: hypercritical, jealous, demanding, racist, and unafraid to be completely obnoxious. Ayanokoji—who she meets by chance in Japan in 1982 when she debunks from a conference because it’s tedious—wonders how her two husbands have coped with her negativity and her compulsion to say what she thought. She is strong on logic, but her argument often cynical, with a sting in the tail. How did they put up with her anxiety, impetuousness, and her over-analysis of others but not of herself?
But why should we trust his opinion? He is a man who has successfully hidden shameful truths about himself from his colleagues and his wife for decades.
Death of a Coast Watcher is an artful novel that asks very difficult questions: about evil acts done by all sides in war; about mythologising false heroism; about whether atrocities should be memorialised because that might only foster ongoing hatred, and about how governments so readily abandon moral principles for strategic, economic and diplomatic reasons. In 1971 Peter is annoyed that he has to pander to a Japanese delegation come to reclaim body parts and relics of dead combatants: he wants to tell them uncomfortable truths that are never alluded to in the Japanese curriculum, and he gets some advice from a colleague that I find intriguing, and not just in the context of this dialogue:
“Wear the gag. Then write and publish what you want when your contract’s over.” (p.257)
It’s really hard to do justice in a review to a thought-provoking book like this one. Highly recommended.
(Additional comment by reviewer in subsequent blog: .… It takes a certain kind of reader to appreciate the genius of this book…. I like books that expand my way of looking at the world. This book … kept me wholly absorbed for the entire time I was reading it.)
