By Alexander Parsons
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 240 pages
Available at Powerbooks
Picking up the sealed-in-plastic In the Shadows of the Sun by Alexander Parsons, I perused the back cover and the word "Philippines" swam into my line of vision. This immediately piqued my interest. In the tradition of Alex Garland and James Hamilton-Paterson, here was a foreign fiction writer (American, in this case) who was using the Philippines as the setting for a major part of his novel. The saga of a New Mexico family in the early 1940s, the novel promised to show how World War II not only affected those at the front, but those left back home.
The opening chapter of the novel places one of our protagonists, Jack Strickland, as a participant in the Bataan Death March. Coupled with the following "flashback" chapter which introduces us to the Strickland family and the New Mexico setting, one gleans that one is in Cormac McCarthy country, where the rugged Western terrain is etched on the personas of our characters. But where McCarthy maintains a terse, muscular approach in his writing, Parsons imbues a much more lyrical, dreamlike quality to his fiction style (it reminded me of McCarthy meets Sebastian Faulks, and I mean that in a good way). This is the "country" from where legends and ballads arise, and Parsons digs deep to extract "gold" from the desolate and sparse desert environment. He gives us strong family drama, while waxing poetic about the setting – whether it be New Mexico or the Philippines.
Ross and Baylis Strickland are grizzled New Mexico ranch owners. Unlike others whose land has been passed down from generation to generation, the Stricklands are new, fierce and proud possessors of their land holdings. As the United States has to confront Japan and the Pacific theater of the War, the government forecloses on the Strickland property for the testing of bombs and planes by the Army Air Corps. Already feeling the US Government has emerged as an "enemy," this sentiment is further reinforced when son Jack is called up to do service, and sent to the Philippines. As Jack’s father exclaims, isn’t the giving up of his only son enough of a price to pay in the service of the war effort? Why is the land they have bled and slaved for now part of that price?
Within this New Mexico community, brothers Napoleon and Wink Seery stand on the other side of the coin. Rustlers, layabouts and ornery characters, they stand as nemeses to the Stricklands. It is this community drama that drives the plot forward as it develops within the New Mexico setting. The other major strand of the book deals with Jack’s wartime exploits and his ordeals as a prisoner of war here in the Philippines. Adding pathos to the mix is the very astute delineation of the domestic drama that unfolds as we are introduced to Alida and Sara, wives to the Strickland brothers.
I say astute because Parsons reveals himself as sensitive to the very real, fragile and human elements of marriage and relationships. As he writes about sex in marriage: "She unbuttoned his shirt. He pressed his palms to her breasts, feeling their lovely resilience. But as they moved, sex took on a mechanical quality, became a prescribed set of motions reminiscent of too many past and undifferentiated couplings. As if their history had more substance than their present."
If there is one word that consistently characterizes Parsons’ writing style, it is "evocative." He is never anything less than that. In the opening chapter set during the Bataan Death March, the heat, the dust, the stench, the putrefaction are keenly felt. His passages firmly put us, dreamlike, in the March itself; and this he accomplishes while pushing the story forward plotwise. In a subsequent chapter that finds Jack helping clear an airfield in Palawan after surviving Bataan, a big monitor lizard lying on a bed of human feces becomes the stark image that jostles us viscerally. That the killing of this lizard then becomes a metaphor for what vestige of freedom and free will these POWs can still possess is one the strong plot devices that Parsons uses to carry us through his story.
And naturally, Jack’s progress through the war becomes of special interest to us Filipino readers. On this count, Parsons has done the research and gives us the grand tour of the islands – from Bataan to that airfield in Palawan, then to Bilibid in Manila. They board a ship leaving for Japan but the ship is attacked and the prisoners end up in Subic. Transported to San Fernando and then La Union, they eventually end up in Formosa, before emerging as part of the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo. From as early on as Bataan, Jack is presumed dead and the US government announces it to the family in New Mexico, so there is dramatic tension created as we race through Jack’s peregrinations and wonder if he’ll ever do that dramatic showing-up on the steps of his home to reunite with what is left of the family and of the home. I says "what is left" because – as can be expected, beyond the foreclosure – the domestic arrangements have had their own set of disasters, exits and movements.
At its heart, In the Shadows of the Sun is about the personal side of history. How, while events unfold on the world stage, there are personal lives and stories that are affected by these events with consequences that are deeply felt across years and generations. Also to its merit is the vivid authenticity that Parsons imbues his book with – whether it be the mountain desert of New Mexico, the steamy tropical jungles of our Philippines, or the characters that we encounter on our way through the novel.