The Wreckage is one of the most complicated, yet compelling, books I've ever read. What appears to be a straight-forward love story set in WWII, what seems to be familiar territory, turns out to be a masterful exploration of humanity and identity and the limits of how well we can ever know one another. With a native son's eye and a poet's facility with words, Michael Crummey paints the landscape and ethos of pre-Confederation Newfoundland, capturing a people right before modernity changes their generations-old prejudices and way of life. With the misdirection of a practised conjurer, the author makes us believe we are reading one story until, with little flourish, he makes revelations at the end that throw everything we think we know into doubt.
Told from the shifting POV of three characters and spanning fifty years and two continents, Crummey cast his net wide and deep to create a complex and emotional narrative. Any discussion of the plot would be ruinous to those who haven't read The Wreckage, so:
*** spoilers beyond ***
Mercedes (Sadie) is a beautiful and willful 16 year old, living in a remote fishing village. When Wish -- an 18 year old travelling movie projectionist -- appears in the Cove, Sadie remembers him from an earlier visit and is open to his (mostly innocent) advances. I'm usually underwhelmed by male authors' portrayals of girls and women, but Crummey writes of Sadie's sexual awakening with a simple honesty that I totally believed. While Sadie's mother warns Wish that her daughter sees him as just a door to somewhere, anywhere, else, the reader can see that the girl has been captivated by the handsome stranger; her heart belongs to Wish and no other in that way that only a 16 year old girl can believe. Sadie's Protestant parents vehemently disapprove of the Catholic boy's attentions, and after a fishing tragedy and a fight with her brother, Wish runs away. Sadie follows him to St. John's, only to discover that Wish has enlisted in the army, but vows to wait for him. Only when the war is over and an army buddy writes to tell her that Wish had died in a Japanese POW camp does Sadie move on with her life, marrying an American soldier she had befriended. (Recently reading The Colony of Unrequited Dreams helped to bring this time and place alive for me.)
Nishino is a Japanese soldier who, it is eventually revealed, was raised in Kitsilano, British Columbia. His fluency in English allows him to be posted as an interpreter in a POW camp after an injury occurs in battle, and his cruelty and barbarism are fused with a fanatical belief that the Japanese would succeed at claiming "Asia for Asians". His history as an ostracised outsider is slowly revealed and the prejudice that he suffered as a child in Canada makes him particularly brutal with the Canadians in the camp, including Wish who joined up with them. I wondered at this plot point -- would Nishino really be such a fanatical anti-Canadian after spending his entire life there? -- and especially because he ran off to join the Imperial Army before there were Japanese internment camps in Canada. But then I remembered the so-called Toronto 18, a group of young Canadian Muslim men who plotted to "behead the Prime Minister", and although many of them had been born in Canada, for the most part to thoroughly secular parents, I can still picture the sister of one of the men, burqa-clad, screeching at TV cameras that vengeance would be theirs, to the apparent bewilderment of her parents. So Nishino's barbarism is plausible, even if it seems to demonstrate a cracked mind. Since the POW camp is outside Nagasaki, when the atomic bomb is dropped, Nishino is advised to run away before Japan surrenders (and before he would need to answer for his actions) and he leaves to hide in a church basement. (Having recently read Unbroken helped me to picture the brutality of a Japanese POW camp -- this was not exaggerated in this book.)
Aloysius (Wish) is an orphan, having lost his father to a tidal wave and his mother to Diphtheria. He partnered with Hiram, an alcoholic with a gambling problem, to bring movies to coastal communities. After capturing the heart of the beautiful Sadie, but thinking that he killed her brother in a drunken fight, he ran away and joined the British army with a couple of Canadians he met in Halifax. Without firing a single shot, his battalion was surrendered to the Japanese and Wish spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp. After he was liberated, Wish convinced his friend to write to Sadie and tell her that he had been killed, and he spends decades as an itinerant labourer across Canada and the US, never marrying or settling down, eventually returning to Newfoundland to take care of his aging aunt. In 1994, Wish and Sadie are reunited when she returns to St. John's to scatter her dead husband's ashes, but while she appears to still hold Wish in her heart, his seems to have been turned to stone.
That's a lot more plot summary than I usually give, but it's the bare minimum to understand the real crux of the story: Throughout the entire book, you don't doubt the love story -- Sadie and Wish are star-crossed lovers; fate brought them together and tore them apart and the reader is rooting for them to re-find each other eventually. You never doubt their loyalty to each other, and while Sadie has the comfort of a husband and children, it's pathetic to see that Wish can't open himself to love after having his heart broken; after the war had hardened him into someone not worthy of Sadie anymore. But then, after they do reunite and Wish is cold and unaffectionate, two things are revealed: After the POW camp was liberated, Wish and two of his friends found Nishino in the church basement and beat him to death. While the friends "pissed" on the dead guard's face and urged him to join them, Wish couldn't because he realised he had an erection -- and that fact told Wish just what kind of a man he really was. In retrospect, he had been happy to see the burnt out city of Nagasaki, including the suffering of its residents, right down to children with peeling skin. Also revealed was the fact that Wish had originally pursued Sadie because Hiram bet him $5 he couldn't bed her -- Wish took this bet in every port ("I was just a youngster," he said again. "I would have screwed a knothole in a fence for fifty cents.") and suddenly his entire character came into focus: At the beginning of the book, Wish is a drifter, taking odd jobs here and there, not settling down for long, and after the war, he continues to be a drifter -- this wasn't a result of the war but just a continuation of his essential character. Just like Sadie was taken in by Wish's youthful exuberance and declarations of love, so too is the reader led to believe that he was who he pretended to be -- and it turns out that he's just not a good man. (It was an elaborate lie that even he was taken in by, a fiction that comforted him through the length of the war as if it was real.) It is said that at one point in the pursuit Wish did indeed fall in love with Sadie, but it's not enough to make him want to do right by her, and nearing 70 as the book concludes, it's unclear whether he is interested in the love that Sadie is still offering.
***end of spoilers***
And as if the plot isn't complex and satisfying enough, Crummey layers the book with mythology and allegory and coincidences that question the roles of fate and predestination in the characters' lives.
He shouldn't have hooked up with Harris and Anstey in that bar, the two of them drunk and no real idea what England was or the army or where they'd end up. If one useless bastard in Halifax had given him sensible directions to the enlistment office. He shouldn't have listened to Hiram and run off to Halifax in the first place. If he hadn't hauled Hardy down the stairs, none of this. If he hadn't knelt to say the rosary over poor drowned Aubrey Parsons. Hadn't chased after a Protestant girl whose mother would never have him. He shouldn't have hooked up with Hiram at all, was the truth of it, shouldn't have left Renfrews.
He lay awake through hours of this kind of suffering at night while the camp was quiet and Harris and Anstley slept or lay silently running over their own lists. There was a sickening sense of inevitability to the rain of incidence and circumstance when Wish looked back on it. He started to feel even the subtlest shift -- if he'd woken earlier on the day he first saw Mercedes, if he'd drunk one beer more or less in the Halifax bar -- even the most inconsequential change would have been enough to alter the chain of events and his life now would be completely different. God's hand was there in the details, Lilly always said, turning you left or right. And there was some vague comfort in thinking God was to blame.
Runaway horses and dead mothers and Catholic iconography and the nearly biblical wrath of the punishing ocean make recurring appearances (as does contemptuous peeing). Also explored are ideas of responsibility, personal and communal, and the shifting parameters of right and wrong:
"I'll tell you what I thought at the time. I thought the Americans were the only ones in the world had the guts to drop those bombs and God bless them. I prayed for more, is the truth of it. Even after I saw what it did…
"I'll tell you what I think now, Isabella," he said. He spoke without raising his voice. "There isn’t another country in the world could have dropped those bombs and then carried on claiming love is the cure for all that ails the world. What a feat that is. Hallmark and Disneyland and Hollywood and whatever else makes you believe such bullshit. What a feat," he said again.
There is so much to The Wreckage, beautifully constructed and written, that it gets my highest recommendation. Why do these writers from Newfoundland keep capturing and then breaking my heart?
