Certainty (review)

In Canada, World War II is usually remembered as a European war. When Remembrance Day comes round, it is footage of Canadians fighting in Italy and Normandy that dominates the television specials. But for many Asian Canadians, what looms largest in memory is not the conflict in Europe but events in the Pacific theatre: the Japanese colonization of Korea and Manchuria, and the advance of the Japanese army through South East Asia. Three recent Canadian novels, Dennis Bock’s The Ash Garden, Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts, and Rui Umezawa’s The Truth about Death and Dying, look at World War II from an Asian perspective. So too does Madeleine Thien’s new novel Certainty. Although much of Thien’s novel takes place in contemporary Vancouver, the central event (inasmuch as Certainty has one) occurs during the Japanese retreat from Borneo in 1945. Matthew Lin, then a young boy, sees his father murdered by the Japanese troops. His childhood sweetheart, Ani, is left an orphan by the chaos of war. These wartime losses cannot be forgotten or left behind, even though Matthew ultimately emigrates to Canada, and Ani ends up living in the Netherlands.

Certainty is nothing if not ambitious. It tackles serious themes — war, grief, race, memory, AIDS. Its canvas is large: the settings include Vancouver, Sandakan (in Borneo), Jakarta, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands. So too is the cast of characters: Matthew and his wife, Clara, their daughter, Gail, and her husband, Ansel, Ani and her husband, Sipke. The novel spans more than fifty years, but it is not presented in chronological order. Divided into nine sections, each of which begins in a specific time and place, Certainty shuttles constantly among its varied settings and time frames.

However, Certainty, for all its ambition and complexity, is thin. A major problem is that it has no compelling central character. Gail, Matthew’s Canadian-born child, would seem the logical anchor; she is the one who investigates the past and struggles to understand its effect on the present. But Gail is already dead when the novel begins, a youthful victim of pneumonia. There are sections that deal with her relationship with Ansel and her career as a radio producer; the sections set in the Netherlands, to which Gail travels to find out about her father’s past with Ani, feature Gail as focalizer. But Gail has neither enough substance nor prominence to hold the novel together. A second problem is that there is not much in the way of plot. Thien introduces a diary written in code by a Canadian POW during his years in a Japanese POW camp. It seems as if this diary, once its code is broken, will somehow lead back to Matthew’s childhood in Borneo, maybe it will reveal more about Matthew’s father, who collaborated with the Japanese in order to save his family. But the diary never has any significance except as the subject of the radio documentary Gail was working on at the time of her death.

Thien has been praised as a graceful, lucid writer, but I found Certainty tedious. Much of the novel is written in the present tense. Perhaps present-tense narration is intended to confer immediacy and intimacy, but in this novel it just seems precious and inert. Descriptive passages are puffed up with overwrought similes. Irritating errors — snow in Melbourne, Pakistanis speaking “Pakistani” — further eroded my trust and interest.

There are moments when Certainty quickens into life. Sipke is a photojournalist who has taken pictures in the world’s war zones. When he talks to Gail about what his pictures of war actually convey, he comes to grips with a central problem in representing war: “People look at [my] picture .... in magazines and books, and they speculate about it. … All they see is this one moment, disconnected from the past or the future. It feeds their imagination, but it doesn’t give them knowledge”(245–6). Here, Thien succeeds both in saying something serious and in making her characters worthy...