The Daughters of Mars

Two talented and interesting writers now playing their craft in Australia are David Malouf and Thomas Keneally. I've read almost all of David Malouf's published works and about two thirds of the more prolific Thomas Keneally's. I've met both, had a long and interesting conversation with David Malouf when he visited Ottawa some years ago, and exchanged a few remarks with Tom Keneally in Dymock's book shop on George Street in Sydney during one of our visits to Oz about 25 years ago. If I was pressed I'd describe David Malouf as an artist with words and Thomas Keneally as a literary craftsman. In The Daughters of Mars he explores a theme that's long been popular with Australian writers - and readers: the Great War of 1914-1918, the ghastly fiasco of the Gallipoli campaign and the even more ghastly killing fields of France. Obviously many of the characters are men in uniform, but the leading characters in this very impressive novel are nurses, in particular Naomi and Sally Durance, sisters from a 'cow cocky' dairy farm who trained in New South Wales. They lived through the Gallipoli campaign at second hand, so to say, from the vantage point of a hospital ship, and the worse horrors of trench warfare in France from casualty clearing stations and land-based hospitals. The graphic descriptions of war wounds are vivid and accurate. As not-quite-light relief the nurses' free time includes emotional entanglements, a rape of one of their nursing sisters, resistance against rigid rules. They survive the loss of their hospital ship (torpedoed when it's repainted with red crosses blacked out and carrying troops and horses from Egypt to Gallipoli) and survive emotional entanglements with men in uniform. Having seen the battlefields of Gallipoli, the islands at the head of the Aegean Sea, and glimpsed parts of the Western Front where so many died vainly, I found it easy to relate to Keneally's account of nurses' roles in these campaigns. I don't think this long novel quite reaches the heights of excellence he scaled in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Schindler's Ark (which won the Booker Prize and was made into a superb movie) or his books about the Eritrean-Ethiopian wars, but it's an excellent novel that I recommend very strongly.