500 Words From...is a series of guest posts
from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books. Here Ann Bennett explains the
background behind Bamboo Heart, published in paperback today by Monsoon Books.
Ann Bennett is a UK-based novelist and
lawyer.
Set in South East Asia both in the present and before and during the Second
World War, Bamboo Heart captures the
suffering and courage of prisoners of war of the Japanese. It tells the story
of Tom Ellis, a prisoner enslaved on the infamous Death Railway in Thailand,
and charts the journey of his daughter, Laura, who turns her back on her comfortable lifestyle in eighties London to investigate her father's wartime experience.
So: 500 Words From Ann Bennett
At the end of the Second World War allied intelligence services surveyed newly-released prisoners of war with so-called liberation questionnaires. My novel, Bamboo
Heart, started life when I discovered my father’s liberation questionnaire in Britain's National Archives. It was an amazing moment when I first saw it;
written in his perfect copper-plate hand, it answered so many questions I would
like to have asked. From that moment I knew I had to write about his
experiences as a prisoner-of-war on the Death Railway in Thailand.
This
discovery was the culmination of a lifetime’s quest to find out what had
happened to my father during the war. He died when I was only seven, and
growing up I became increasingly interested in his past. He hardly spoke about
the war, having started a new life with my mother on his return to England in
1945. I was interested enough to travel to Kanchanaburi to see the railway in
1988. On that trip I fell in love with South East Asia, but found out very
little about what had happened to my father there.
I
took the tragic events Dad described in his questionnaire as the basis of Tom’s
story in Bamboo Heart. I wanted to write about those events from the
perspective of one man, within the framework of a fast-moving narrative. My aim
was to bring those events alive without it feeling like a history lesson.
The
events I was describing were harrowing. So to lighten the mood, I broke it up
with flashbacks to Tom’s pre-war life in colonial Penang, where he fell in
love. I also introduced a parallel modern plot, the story of Tom’s own
daughter’s search for the truth about the war. For Laura’s story I drew upon my
own life as a disaffected young lawyer in the eighties, and upon my memories of
those times. The novel touches on the Wapping Riots, famous in the UK, which I remember well. Co-incidentally
the first day of serious rioting was 15th February 1986, the
anniversary of the Fall of Singapore.
I
tried to tell a story of hope and survival, to examine the reasons why some
survived the worst of ordeals and others sadly did not. I also wanted to show
what an important role history plays in all our lives; how powerfully our
family’s past affects our own choices and values.
My
research for Bamboo Heart taught me so much more about the war in the Far East
than I had expected. I had not previously known how civilians suffered; about
starvation and massacres, about bravery and sacrifice. It inspired me to
explore those events from other angles and through other peoples’ stories.
Bamboo Heart is the first novel in a planned trilogy. I
have just finished writing Bamboo Island, about Juliet, a plantation owner’s
wife, who
has lived a reclusive life since the war robbed her of everyone she loved. The
sudden appearance of a stranger disrupts her lonely existence and stirs up
unsettling memories.
I’m also working on a
third novel: Bamboo Road, about of the daughter of a member of the Thai
resistance which tells how the influx of prisoners-of-war into that remote
jungle region affects her life.
Click here for Ann’s
website.
