by Simone Lazaroo
Picador, May 2001
ISBN 0330362666
211pgs, RRPA$25.00
The Australian Fiance works just below the level of consciousness. Submerged, with its quiet pain, a silent witness, watching the action from deep below the surface. In Singapore, just after the end of World War II, a young Eurasian woman, beautiful, and damaged from Japanese occupation and the role she had to play as a prisoner, meets a handsome Australian. He pursues her, and convinces her to return to Broome, Western Australia as his fiance. The two main characters, both nameless, except in terms of their roles within the story: “the young Eurasian”, and “the Australian Fiance” come together and come apart, parallelling each other in their pain and hunger, and coming to terms with the truths both have been hiding from. The language of this novel is beautiful, moving chapter by chapter between first and third person; but always from the point of view of the Eurasian, who is recalling her tale many years later, slipping in and out of the present and past. The narrative voice, especially when in third person, has the rhythm, and even occasionally the structure, of poetry:
"This is not love.
If not love, then, what?
Another hunger.
What kind of hunger?
Not food hunger. Acknowledge-me hunger. Leave-me-more-of-your-offerings hunger. Bring-me-back-from-the-dead hunger."(49).
The words leave us with a sense of meaning rather than a clean expression of it, as good poetry does. The Eurasian woman takes us inside her inchoate longings, her desires and shame, as she moves towards a life which is "normal", only to find that there are many kinds of love, and that truth and meaning are as uncertain as war and guilt.
One of the main devices used throughout the novel is the reference to photography. The fiance is an amateur photographer, and each chapter begins with a quote from his "Twin Lens Camera Companion". His photographs provide a series of concrete images; freeze frames in the midst of the shifting emotions; snapshots in time. They pick up the light imagery which runs throughout the story: "She closes her eyes to this light that is like the end of light"(48), or rooms that go from darkness to a sudden flooding of light, and also provide another dimension of removal from the first person narrative which shifts into third, and finally moves into a photographic image. There is the cardboard hatbox of photos she finds: the Japanese woman's snaps of Broome immigrants – a series of lives, discarded, relegated to the top of a cupboard. As the Eurasian woman takes up photography herself, using the Australian's old brownie box she tried to take from him, she finds some meaning in the frozen image, and in the final two photos which bridge the immense distance between past and present.
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