Customer Reviews

Empress of Asia: A Novel

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The beginning of this book captivated me. I thought I was starting a love story - a book about a once upon a time love...the kind of story that I hear from my grandma and others of the WWII generation. Two people meet in a world that is upside down and they just KNOW they are meant together. And many MANY years later, one loses the other and is unsure how to continue on alone.

I'm not sure why I thought that...but I was wrong. The first chapter was like that as Harry Winslow prepares for and then loses his wife Lily. The love and heartache are there - the sense of bewilderment of an old man who doesn't know how to go on. And then we go back in time to pre-World War II Canada with Harry, a young man who is ready to embark on just about any adventure that will get his life started. We then spend the next 7/8 of the book as he heads for the sea, meets Lily, endures one of the first battles with the Japanese, and is then captured and taken to a POW camp.

I do not mean to make light of or diminish the importance of Harry's experiences during the war. I just glimpsed such a sense of deep feeling in the modern day Harry that I didn't get even during the most gut wrenching war scenes that I kept turning the pages faster and faster, hoping we'd either jump to modern day for at least a scene. But, it was not to be.

During his war years, Harry does maintain a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the absurd, and is astonished along with the reader as we see some of the unbelievable things that happen during wartime. Some parts of the book, too, were heartbreaking, or would be if I felt more like Harry was experiencing them as well, instead of merely noting them.

FINALLY, in the last chapter(s) of the book, we return to modern day Harry as he is faced with a part of his wife he never knew, an aspect of her life he was blind to. And here, the emotion of an old man who has done and seen too much, comes through with full force.

"The one thought that's been creeping in is that I haven't lost you quite as much as I'd thought I had. I haven't lost you because as it turns out the you that I lost wasn't a real person. A guy can't have lost what didn't exist in the first place, right? No, she did exist, but I only saw half."

Maybe because he saw so much of the inexplicable during the war, he stopped seeing things he couldn't understand once he'd survived the war. The war changed him dramatically, taking away his desire for travel, for new experiences, for adventure. He just wanted his wife - and only the version of the wife he remembered from the day they'd met.

In the end, Harry is faced with the fact that he didn't really know his wife. The reader is faced with the fact that while we know many things that took place in Harry's life during his youth, we don't really know Harry. Which is a shame.

"Empress of Asia" begins with protagonist, Harry Winslow, describing life as "bursts of activity that happen so quickly that we can't even tell exactly what's happening."

In a sense, this story is Harry's description of his own life's "bursts of activity". Beginning in the late 1930's, Harry's adult life begins when he leaves home to work on boats. As World War II unfolds, Harry is inadvertently drawn eastward and into the heart of the Japanese war in and around Singapore. It is an exciting couple of years for an otherwise mild-mannered, unambitious man, who is far more motivated by really great jazz than political idealism and freedom from fascism.

Shortly before she dies, at the very beginning of the book, Harry's wife Lily exhorts Harry to travel to Thailand in search of a long lost friend from the war. The book's story unfolds as Harry recollects these defining wartime years of his life.

Harry is masterfully drawn as a painfully short-sighted Everyman drawn into extraordinary events. Encompassing an approximately seven-year stretch of time from about 1938 to 1945, it is primarily through the self-determination and ambition of others, that Harry goes where he goes and does what he does. Over and over, he is the hapless beneficiary of the ambition, courage, and cleverness of other people.

The concluding section of the book finds the elderly Harry in Thailand following the trail of crumbs Lily left for him to find his old friend. What he untimately discovers rattles everything he thought about his life since the war. Despite his dramatic time in Asia, before and after, because of fear and prejudices, he has lived a limited, shuttered life. Thailand wakes him up.

Had I a few less interruptions by my four kids, I would have gotten through "Empress of Asia" in two days instead of three. I stayed up late and woke up early to get in a few extra pages. Even days after finishing, I still have a palpable sense of the Malay Peninsula during World War II; that lesser known WWII arena of exotic heat, bugs, landscape, and people.

"Empress of Asia" was originally published in Canada in 2006; March 2008 will be its debut in the United States. Schroeder is a Canadian poet of some repute, and as a reader, it is clear to me that he has a poet's ear for the cadence of narrative and dialogue. His story flows indelibly from page to page - it is a hard book to put down and pick up, not because the reading is difficult (it isn't), but because it is so utterly transporting. Schroeder's subtextual use of dialogue and foreign dialects is masterful. (Note: Though the book doesn't contain a glossary, there is a very good one on Schroeder's website that is worth referencing.) Schoeder's characters are refreshingly multifaceted - all have an authentic balance of strengths and weaknesses.

Towards the end of the book, Harry discovers bowls of live snakes and turtles for sale in a Thai market, and makes this telling observation about the will to survive: "Of course the snakes just slither around in the bottom but.... the turtles are stacked one on top of the other and in the fifteen seconds that I'm watching one of them drags himself to the top and flips onto the pavement!.... [I]f they're all going to end up in the soup anyway, why should the [turtles] on the bottom give two shakes if the ones on top have a little more ambition? In the meantime the snakes just lay there wondering which minute is going to be their last, so which bowl would you rather have been in?"

Harry appears to be much more like one of the snakes, waiting passively along through events, but there are numerous ambitious turtles with whom he finds himself entangled and carried along, and, in the end, he survives. As the reader, I am left to wonder, of the snake and turtle, which am I?

I definitely recommend "Empress of Asia".

i looked forward to this book because my father worked for the owners of the empress of asia and was also 6 years as a seaforth in this war.after the war he returned to the canadian pacific steamships. i was not disapointed upon reading it. men returning from world war 2 did not talk much about their experiences. this book puts you in the midst of war. it was entertaining and informative about a time we had little personal information. so this book gave us that.

Though it starts quietly with the reflections of Harry Winslow soon after the death of his wife Lily, Empress of Asia is filled with whirlwind experiences that take him from a small town in British Columbia to the Asian Pacific during World War II.

The story is told in three parts - and all told as an internal conversation of Harry with his deceased wife. That technique works well in the first portion of the book, less well during the lengthy second portion as Harry recounts his Asian experiences, and, at times, it is annoying during the third portion, as Harry repeatedly wonders if Lily had "seen this" or "was familiar with that" during his surprising discoveries about Lily's life.

Harry's initial descriptions of the chaos in the Pacific during World War II draw one in effectively, including his explanation of how he met Lily amidst that chaos - however, this section of the book, the lengthiest one by far, lost steam for me, especially in the latter portions.

The final section of the book brings resolution to the mystery we encounter in the first few pages, providing surprise, sadness, and wonder about the challenge of moving forward while reflecting on the past. It is an ending that raises interesting questions in one's own life even if the life events and final twist are not as spectacular as those in Harry and Lily's.

The book was generally a good read. Like the music of The Tragically Hip, it is (in some ways) refreshingly Canadian - which is a very positive thing.

Harry Winslow is stunned when his wife Lily on her death bed at St. Paul Hospital informs him that his French World War II buddy Michel Ney was still alive; Harry had thought Michel had died several years ago. She gives him an address and unanswered questions like how did she know this man whom he assumed she never met. His quest to meet up with the Frenchman who saved his life back in 1942 takes him to Kanchaburi Province, Thailand.

On his quest Harry reflects back to his days as a Canadian marine in Singapore. He met, married and lost Lily there in one day when the Japanese invaded the island and captured him as a prisoner of war. He went to a Japanese prison camp where he met Michel. They became friends until the Japanese separated them. He later learned Michel died trying to escape internment. After the war ended, Harry finds Lily, freed form a women's prison, but she hid a dark disturbing secret from her husband.

EMPRESS OF ASIA is a fascinating look at the negative impact of war on the lives of people even decades after the conflict is over. The story line is superb when it focuses on the three main characters in the present and during WW II. However, there is an overwhelming sense of place due to overwritten but picturesque descriptions of geography. Still filled with excitement, readers will appreciate Adam Lewis Schroeder's fine tale that armchair cheerleaders insisting the surge is working should read to understand the long term side effects of war on the soldiers (and their families).

Harriet Klausner

Schroeder's second book is a very charming triumph: funny, moving, brave & kinda strange. An outstanding piece of work. Get it & dig it.