The Consequences of War

A couple of years ago, a publisher sent me a pre-publication copy of a novel by Georgina Harding. I’m so glad she did for otherwise I might never have come across the work of an outstanding writer, one who deserves a much wider audience.

‘There are images that stay like stains on the memory,’ remarks Jonathan Ashe early on in The Gun Room (2016), the first book in Georgina Harding’s marvellous Harvest trilogy. Intentionally or not, he’s paraphrasing the photographer Diane Arbus, whose actual words provide the epigraph to the trilogy, alerting readers to the novelist’s theme: ‘[Photographs] are the proof of something that was there and no longer is. Like a stain.’ It seems at first as if Jonathan’s observation relates only to the Vietnam War photograph that has made him famous, not of the dead mother he saw lying on a path – a Vietnamese farm girl gunned down as she walked with her hoe to the fields – but that of the American soldier who sat alone in the dust by a nearby village wall, seen but unseeing. Later, by almost too neat a coincidence, the photographer again encounters his subject, now a handsome civilian adrift in Tokyo, where both men are seeking in anonymity some refuge from their damaged pasts. Jonathan had grown up in England, on a tranquil family farm in Norfolk. The soldier, Jim, is a pastor’s son, bred on the flat farmlands of Iowa. But it isn’t simply a shared rural background that connects the pair. ‘You took that picture,’ Jim states, before accusing Jonathan of ‘sightseeing’ in a world he knows nothing about:

People see your pictures and say, yeah, that’s war. They have these words to go with the pictures. That’s a soldier in a war. They think they know what the soldier did . . . They think they know, and they know nothing.

Talking to his Japanese girlfriend, Kumiko – the catalyst in Harding’s artfully interwoven trilogy – Jonathan is forced to acknowledge the damage he has done. His photograph, while it carried no caption, projected the seated soldier as a guilty man, while Jim may in fact only have borne the burden of witnessing an atrocity. But seeing alone creates a kind of guilt, and nobody is more painfully aware of the witness’s complicity than Jonathan, a photographer who has taken to hiding behind his camera, after years of concealing what he himself – as we gradually discover – once witnessed as a child. Harding is a thoughtful and disciplined writer. Slowly, she allows us to appreciate the rift between runaway Jonathan and his older brother Richard, the sibling who stayed at home to run the Norfolk farm. Something that the family should have shared has been hidden. ‘You saw,’ Richard accuses Jonathan after their father Charlie’s sudden death in a spinney (the small wood that plays the same recurring and symbolic role in the Harvest cycle as the derelict greenhouse in The Go-Between). Claire, the boys’ mother, insists that Charlie Ashe’s shocking end was an accident: against all evidence, she claims that a loaded gun must have accidentally discharged itself while its owner, a cautious man, clambered over a fence that Jonathan informs us – but chooses not to remind his mother – had never in reality existed. Richard’s growing anger with his obdurately reticent brother derives from his conviction that Jonathan had watched his father die, and then concealed that crucial fact of his own presence. Harding reveals a more complex truth. Jonathan, a child of 7, had indeed climbed out of bed in order to track his father across the farm’s misty fields. He heard the shot, but all he ever saw was a recognizable shape on the ground, and the earth growing sodden as it blotted up spilt blood from a head that – horrifyingly – was no longer there. ‘I didn’t see anything happen,’ Jonathan will always truthfully but misleadingly assert. Unable to destroy his mother’s comforting act of self-deception, he adopts a camera as his new, protective eye, a kind of shield that distances him from personal involvement. Cleverly, Harding keeps her readers in the dark about just how much Richard Ashe, a troubled boy who torments his brother for not sharing his knowledge, really did want to understand the truth about his adored father’s bewildering death. Kumiko’s perceptive questions about the complicity of a witness unsettle Jonathan more than Richard’s clumsy aggression. So does his own bafflingly passive response to the unexpected suicide of a young girl at a Tokyo train station. He sees the approaching train, and then the crowd’s sudden withdrawal, ‘moved back like a wave by the men in white gloves’. Had he seen the girl close, he asks himself, would he have remained sufficiently detached to photograph her even as she jumped? Harding presents Jonathan with a tougher moral challenge when she enables him to discover that Kumiko’s grandfather, a gentle old man obsessively tending his bonsai (just as Claire Ashe wistfully tends her garden of French roses in England), was one of his father’s adversaries in a war that would eventually cause a middle-aged farmer to blow out his brains in a Norfolk wood. A hint of future reconciliation between the troubled photographer and his haunted past surfaces in the final pages of The Gun Room, when Jonathan plans to send Kumiko a card, inviting her to visit the Ashes’ English farmhouse. The possible consequences of his suggestion hover unanswered throughout the novel’s concluding pages. Harding has always been interested in moral dilemmas and tests of conscience. The Solitude of Thomas Cave (2006) charts the troubled spirit of a seventeenth-century mariner whose response to grief and loss, as a test of his own fortitude, is to isolate himself for a year in the Arctic. Painter of Silence (2012) explores a silenced atrocity in Stalinist Romania through the unplanned reunion of two survivors – who had occupied very different social spheres – from within the same manorial household. These two novels stand alone, but we do Harding an injustice in treating her recent books – as most critics have – as if they, too, were independent works. The Gun Room raises difficult questions. The second book in the trilogy, Land of the Living (2018), answers some of them by taking us back to Charlie Ashe’s experiences in the jungles of Assam and still more remote Nagaland during the Second World War. There, unforgettably and terribly, Charlie came across a group of murdered Sikh soldiers whose eyes – while the captives still lived, bound to treetrunks by the unfurled lengths of their own sacred turbans – had been gouged out by barbed wire. His own small team were massacred in a freak attack from which he himself was the sole fleet-footed survivor. Jonathan Ashe’s guilt stems from having arrived too late to prevent his father’s death. Charlie Ashe cannot forgive himself for having saved his own life by running away. Other novelists have written about the horrors that took place during the fight to prevent Japan from invading India through Nagaland, a peace-loving province loyal to the British Crown. Harding adds a twist of her own by placing the guilt-ridden Charlie Ashe in the unexpectedly benevolent care of a community of Naga head-hunters; there, with disbelief, he penetrates the disguise of the young Japanese soldier, a deserter, who had murdered his comrades. As with the subsequent encounter in Tokyo between Jonathan, the witness, and Jim, the soldier he saw in Vietnam, the question of blame becomes inescapable: which of the two men, the disguised killer or the runaway, is the more culpable? Charlie, while hotly tempted to kill the terrified assassin, recognizes a disquieting connection that stays his hand.

Would the boy think he was a deserter too? . . . Now he thought about it, he wasn’t sure himself. He [Charlie] thought of the others and how he came to be alone and he thought, well, yes, one might well think that was what he was . . . Perhaps it showed, the guilt in him.

Returning to England, Charlie marries Claire, from whom he successfully conceals the worst of his wartime experiences. Artfully, Harding juxtaposes Charlie’s anguished memories with the tense tranquillity of a marriage upon which his unyielding silence about the past imposes a perpetual burden. ‘She thought she could not bear all that was left unsaid,’ Harding has Claire say in the closing pages, but as Charlie’s wife, she knows that she has no option but to comply. ‘She smiled and spoke lightly. That was her part, to be light.’ Harvest is the time of year at which Claire Ashe first discovers that she is pregnant. The title of the cycle’s final book intimates that harvest is also the season in which hidden truths will finally be brought to the surface and revealed. Women play a far more prominent role in Harvest (2021). Kumiko has already shown herself to be an astute poser of awkward questions. Arriving at the lonely Norfolk farm on a perfect summer day, she is too conscious of a buried past to be convinced by Claire’s graceful attempt to present a rural idyll, a garden filled with the exquisite Malmaison roses with which she has banished the emptiness of her life. Gradually, as Claire warms to this bright, cheerfully dressed girl from Japan, a country she had always regarded as her husband’s enemy, disquieting memories begin to emerge. Skilfully, scene by scene, Harding builds up the sense of imminent disaster. Shifting time back to the years that followed Charlie Ashe’s death, she allows Claire to witness her sons’ ferocious response to the visit of a suitor for their widowed mother’s hand. After he leaves the house, Claire finds the boys have broken into her cherished sanctuary, a greenhouse, where they have smashed an entire miniature city of seedling pots. They don’t even bother to pause at her entrance.

How could they do this? Another step, and she saw Richard’s eyes dart to the glass above their heads. Would he have raised the hoe and smashed that too? With one final blow? The sky glittering down on them, glass breaking, falling, cutting boys’ skin? Glass in their eyes. No, tears. Tears in all their eyes. He’s gone, she said. Now come in and have tea. They left the ruins without a word.

Slowly, meticulously, Harding directs her cast of five towards a betrayal and a revelation which together provide both a shocking climax and a possible catharsis. Leaving England, Kamiko, the truthteller, feels as though her words and actions have set the Ashe family’s home on fire. In the book’s final words: ‘It suddenly seemed like arson what she had done.’ As with all of Harding’s novels, the future remains unpredicted. What the Harvest cycle lays bare with a subtle mastery of language and structure – added to rare powers of observation that never falter – are the terrible, unforeseeable consequences of war. Harding’s trilogy is a quiet masterpiece of understated tragedy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Miranda Seymour 2023