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5.0 out of 5 stars
Full of nuance, insight, and complexity, April 18, 2005
Memories, stories, and even whole novels are constructed of many layers, or pieces. There are the parts that are fiction, the parts that are based on fact, and the parts that are true, even if they never actually happened. All these parts fit together to present a bigger picture. In her novel, OTHER ECHOES, author Adèle Geras compares all the different parts of her story to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Individually they are the setting of Borneo, a picnic on the beach, a cruel game of "Cowboys and Indians" beneath the tropical sun, a strange doll and an even stranger man. Together they reveal a larger picture about the British colonial experience following World War II.
OTHER ECHOES is told from the point-of-view of 17-year-old Flora, convalescing in the sanatorium of her English boarding school. Flora recalls her childhood in Borneo, where she and her parents moved after WWII. There she gets caught up in the limited social sphere of the other British colonial children. Tormented by their bullying, she sets out to prove her bravery by doing the one thing they fear. She visits the abandoned house on the hill.
Further pieces of the puzzle reveal the reason for the house's abandonment and the terrible experiences of many of the island's other British colonials when they were imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. These are not Flora's experiences, but she is the same age as many of the children on the island who were born in the camp, and the community is haunted by this shared and secret past.
OTHER ECHOES is about a long vanished time, and yet it doesn't fall completely into the category of historical fiction. Most of the action dwells within the experiences of people who are still living. The world has changed enough in fifty years to make many parts of Flora's world seem quaint or alien. Some examples include the pervasiveness of hats and dresses, or the realization that sunscreen was not widely available until the late 1970s. Other parts jolt us into the uncomfortable realization that some things are not quite as safe in the past as we might like them to be. A passage in which Flora speaks of the two household servants who live with her family in Borneo is particularly uncomfortable:
"We called them Amah and Cook. I was nearly ten, and I called two adults older even than my parents by the name that went with the work they did. I am ashamed now. I want to call them, wherever they are, and shout out: 'I'm sorry. I meant no disrespect.' It is only now that I realize that not calling people by their proper names is the beginning, and by the end one group of people can say of another: you are not like us, you are inferior to us, you are not human beings at all."
Adèle Geras does not make a direct correlation between the ways in which the British colonials treat their household "help," the bullying of the children, or the horrors of the internment camp. And yet all the pieces of the puzzle are present in OTHER ECHOES waiting to be assembled both by Flora and the reader. Like many of Adèle Geras's previous books, OTHER ECHOES has nuance, insight and complexity. I am grateful that this book (originally published in 1982) is back in print so I could have a chance to read it.
--- Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood
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