The Georgia Straight (Vancouver BC),
November 23, 2006:
Anyone who has read Adam Lewis Schroeder's short stories knows what a brave and punchy writer he can be. Still boyish enough in his prosaic swagger to avoid machismo but manly enough to be, well, manly, it's almost as if he channels a well-travelled uncle's devastating mix of pull-my-finger fun and fascination.
With the work of so many younger writers who move from "critically acclaimed" and "promising" short-story collections to first novels, the biggest fear for readers-not to mention publishers and agents-is whether the gifted voice in shorter forms can be translated and sustained in a novel.
For the most part, Schroeder's debut novel, Empress of Asia, lives up to his earlier praise. Clocking in at just over 400 pages, it follows Harry Winslow as he moves from a naive young man in pre-World War II Vernon, B.C., to an ex-merchant marine survivor of a POW camp who uncovers a mystery involving his recently deceased war bride. But unlike many small-town-boy-coming-of-age stories, Schroeder's tale never enters the realm of predictability. From classic jazz recordings and the eating of bats to war crimes, cross-dressing, and random Canadiana, Schroeder consistently folds disparate subjects into a smooth narrative that is both dark in humour and uncompromising in its depiction of wartime conditions.
Some authors seem to set their novels all over the world to satisfy publishers' foreign-rights concerns, but Schroeder's numerous locales are an integral part of the story and benefit greatly from his apt descriptions of otherness.
My only criticism concerns the choice to have Winslow be the narrator, as if he were describing everything to his just-deceased wife. This is strategy intrigued in the beginning, but it jarred my suspension of disbelief whenever the occasional you popped up from the page. Having said that, Empress of Asia is an accomplished and textured tale that is both memorable and rewarding.
October 14, 2006:
What a book!
Empress of Asia, Adam Lewis Schroeder's first novel after his successful short-story collection, Kingdom of Monkeys, is a surefire winner. It's got historical relevance (it's set during the Japanese invasion of Singapore in the Second World War), dramatic suffering (Japanese internment camps, where the Australians, British and others waited to die or be freed), a love story (Lily Brown and Harry Winslow meet and marry in less than 24 hours) and a terrifically funny but dark and confused narrator, who takes the reader on a whirlwind adventure.
November 23, 2006:
Anyone who has read Adam Lewis Schroeder's short stories knows what a brave and punchy writer he can be. Still boyish enough in his prosaic swagger to avoid machismo but manly enough to be, well, manly, it's almost as if he channels a well-travelled uncle's devastating mix of pull-my-finger fun and fascination.
With the work of so many younger writers who move from "critically acclaimed" and "promising" short-story collections to first novels, the biggest fear for readers-not to mention publishers and agents-is whether the gifted voice in shorter forms can be translated and sustained in a novel.
For the most part, Schroeder's debut novel, Empress of Asia, lives up to his earlier praise. Clocking in at just over 400 pages, it follows Harry Winslow as he moves from a naive young man in pre-World War II Vernon, B.C., to an ex-merchant marine survivor of a POW camp who uncovers a mystery involving his recently deceased war bride. But unlike many small-town-boy-coming-of-age stories, Schroeder's tale never enters the realm of predictability. From classic jazz recordings and the eating of bats to war crimes, cross-dressing, and random Canadiana, Schroeder consistently folds disparate subjects into a smooth narrative that is both dark in humour and uncompromising in its depiction of wartime conditions.
Some authors seem to set their novels all over the world to satisfy publishers' foreign-rights concerns, but Schroeder's numerous locales are an integral part of the story and benefit greatly from his apt descriptions of otherness.
My only criticism concerns the choice to have Winslow be the narrator, as if he were describing everything to his just-deceased wife. This is strategy intrigued in the beginning, but it jarred my suspension of disbelief whenever the occasional you popped up from the page. Having said that, Empress of Asia is an accomplished and textured tale that is both memorable and rewarding.
--Billeh Nickerson
The Globe & Mail,October 14, 2006:
What a book!
Empress of Asia, Adam Lewis Schroeder's first novel after his successful short-story collection, Kingdom of Monkeys, is a surefire winner. It's got historical relevance (it's set during the Japanese invasion of Singapore in the Second World War), dramatic suffering (Japanese internment camps, where the Australians, British and others waited to die or be freed), a love story (Lily Brown and Harry Winslow meet and marry in less than 24 hours) and a terrifically funny but dark and confused narrator, who takes the reader on a whirlwind adventure.
Globe & Mail (cont.)
This is a compelling, heartbreaking and witty book that will stay with you long after you've put it down.
At the beginning, it is 1995, and Harry Winslow is at the hospital bed of his wife, Lily, when she blurts out a secret that sends Harry on a trip through the past. Most of Empress of Asia is taken up with Harry's musings, his memories, as he thinks back on 1942 and his part in the Second World War.
This is a compelling, heartbreaking and witty book that will stay with you long after you've put it down.
At the beginning, it is 1995, and Harry Winslow is at the hospital bed of his wife, Lily, when she blurts out a secret that sends Harry on a trip through the past. Most of Empress of Asia is taken up with Harry's musings, his memories, as he thinks back on 1942 and his part in the Second World War.
But instead of writing it in memoir form, Schroeder sends Harry and the reader right back in time. Harry travels by train from Vernon to Vancouver, B.C., to join the merchant marine. Through many adventures, including several sunken ships, Harry ends up in Singapore just as the Japanese are taking over. In one crazy night, Harry meets Lily Brown and falls head over heels in love. They marry, but are separated within hours. Harry is then taken prisoner and meets Michel Ney, a French man who becomes a key figure in the novel. Michel and Harry narrowly escape the internment camps, but are eventually captured again. At the end of the war, Harry manages to find Lily, and they settle in Vancouver, where they run a car lot until Lily's death.
The novel then jumps back to 1995, with Harry taking Lily's deathbed advice and travelling to Thailand to look up an old friend and solve the mystery Lily has planted. I can't tell you what happens, but all is revealed in a completely satisfying way. Schroeder is skilled at leaving hints here and there, but never fully giving away the secret. So in the end, the reader is presented with a wonderful, "aha!" moment. Harry Winslow is a crotchety character when he's old -- and he's crotchety when he's young. His outlook on his life in the war, or in his comfy home in Vancouver, seems about the same. He harbours racist thoughts against the Japanese (with just cause, he thinks, as he muses on his time in the prison camps), and seems to have opinions on just about everything. Harry's character is reminiscent of Hagar Shipley in Margaret Laurence's Stone Angel -- someone slightly angry at just about everything, but with enough will and strength to carry on, if only just to be able to say, "I told you so."
Harry is funny and mean and intelligent and dumb and tender. In 1942, he is a strong-willed sailor with a deep love of jazz, then, in the camps, he is light-headed from hunger and has lost his eyesight from beriberi. At the end, he is an old man who wakes without his wife: "I wake up and listen for your breathing, picturing your hair glued to your poor sweaty head, and I can't feel you beside me but plenty of nights when you're bad I end up away on the other side of the bed, so I know to just listen and wait for you to find that breath. But after a couple of seconds I still don't hear you and my heart takes that funny beat. And then I remember everything that's happened. I'm in Bangkok, Thailand."
Harry's 1995 travels in Thailand, at the end of the book, take on a surreal feel as he stumbles through his past and confronts people he didn't know existed. This is a scattered first-person narrative that is brilliantly written. With dry wit and intense emotional longing, Harry moves the reader around his world, his past, the war and what happened to men and women back then. Memory comes in fragments. Even if it is linear and presented chronologically, memory scatters and moves around with emotion. Schroeder shows us the pain and suffering with the distant eye of an older man looking back, and trying not to remember too clearly. At the end of Empress of Asia, Harry reads a letter that reveals how easily he has been fooled, how easily memories can be shattered, dissected and then rewritten.
This book is just plain superb. I wish Adam Lewis Schroeder all the success he deserves.
--Michelle Berry
The Pique (Whistler BC), October 5, 2006:
“We publish too many books in Canada,” Raincoast Books publisher Allan MacDougall told me recently. “We should be publishing fewer books and of better quality.”
Can there ever be too many books, I wondered at the time? After wading through some of this fall’s new books I have to concede a grudging yes. There can never be too many good books, but there can be too many books on bookstore shelves that would have better been left unpublished.
[At this point someone else's book receives a less-than-flattering review.] At the other end of the book monitoring spectrum is Adam Lewis Schroeder’s Empress of Asia, also a novel of two lovers separated by events, but so deftly crafted and enticingly written it’s a book you will want to press into hands of friends, family, or strangers on the street.
On the brink of World War II Harry Winslow leaves Vernon as a teen to sail the seas on a merchant ship, but soon gets snapped up and imprisoned in a Japanese war camp before being reunited with the mysterious Lily he had met in Singapore and married the same day. Framed by the story of Harry in old age at Lily’s bedside, the novel blends dialogue, place, character and extensive research like a well-travelled but still vibrantly-coloured quilt.
Empress of Asia benefits from Schroeder’s own backpacking travels in capturing the heat, subtleties and aromas of Asia. Throughout the novel Harry tucks the reader by his side with his B.C. boy humour, as in this scene on deck when Emerald, a rusting scow turned troop carrier, is spotted by Japanese bombers:
“They all turned together over the water to come back towards us, and then I saw the red circles on their wings. Our sirens drowned out the sound of everything — the Limeys might’ve fired their guns a hundred times but I barely heard them. I was trying to pay attention to things because in the movies it’s always some little detail that saves a guy’s life, the rusty bolt that he’s been able to unscrew with his fingernails or the scarecrow Terry managed to build so that Captain Blaze’s men wouldn’t shoot him dead. And concentrating on one thing at a time at least kept me from running around screaming…”
Schroeder, a Vernon resident and UBC creative writing grad, cleverly captures Harry’s fretful teenage voice in second person and renders him delightfully into a fussily aging but excruciatingly loyal oldster (“…the first time you ever wore a bikini was to go in that lake. You were thirty-two years old and Holy Christ did you look good… The Arnotts were with us on that trip and I turned around to Les and said Amen. Amen to that.”) who discovers he’s not so lost when he loses his tender Lily.
Influenced from reading War and Peace while travelling Asia and from remembering his grandfather’s war stories, Schroeder has produced a keeper of a novel, a rich tapestry of history and humanity that deserves to be passed from hand to hand to hand.
“We publish too many books in Canada,” Raincoast Books publisher Allan MacDougall told me recently. “We should be publishing fewer books and of better quality.”
Can there ever be too many books, I wondered at the time? After wading through some of this fall’s new books I have to concede a grudging yes. There can never be too many good books, but there can be too many books on bookstore shelves that would have better been left unpublished.
[At this point someone else's book receives a less-than-flattering review.] At the other end of the book monitoring spectrum is Adam Lewis Schroeder’s Empress of Asia, also a novel of two lovers separated by events, but so deftly crafted and enticingly written it’s a book you will want to press into hands of friends, family, or strangers on the street.
On the brink of World War II Harry Winslow leaves Vernon as a teen to sail the seas on a merchant ship, but soon gets snapped up and imprisoned in a Japanese war camp before being reunited with the mysterious Lily he had met in Singapore and married the same day. Framed by the story of Harry in old age at Lily’s bedside, the novel blends dialogue, place, character and extensive research like a well-travelled but still vibrantly-coloured quilt.
Empress of Asia benefits from Schroeder’s own backpacking travels in capturing the heat, subtleties and aromas of Asia. Throughout the novel Harry tucks the reader by his side with his B.C. boy humour, as in this scene on deck when Emerald, a rusting scow turned troop carrier, is spotted by Japanese bombers:
“They all turned together over the water to come back towards us, and then I saw the red circles on their wings. Our sirens drowned out the sound of everything — the Limeys might’ve fired their guns a hundred times but I barely heard them. I was trying to pay attention to things because in the movies it’s always some little detail that saves a guy’s life, the rusty bolt that he’s been able to unscrew with his fingernails or the scarecrow Terry managed to build so that Captain Blaze’s men wouldn’t shoot him dead. And concentrating on one thing at a time at least kept me from running around screaming…”
Schroeder, a Vernon resident and UBC creative writing grad, cleverly captures Harry’s fretful teenage voice in second person and renders him delightfully into a fussily aging but excruciatingly loyal oldster (“…the first time you ever wore a bikini was to go in that lake. You were thirty-two years old and Holy Christ did you look good… The Arnotts were with us on that trip and I turned around to Les and said Amen. Amen to that.”) who discovers he’s not so lost when he loses his tender Lily.
Influenced from reading War and Peace while travelling Asia and from remembering his grandfather’s war stories, Schroeder has produced a keeper of a novel, a rich tapestry of history and humanity that deserves to be passed from hand to hand to hand.
--Vivian Moreau
