Talking about O’Dwyer by C. K. Stead. Harvill Press, London, 246 pages, 2000, $23.00.
The O’Dwyer of C. K. Stead’s title is Donovan O’Dwyer, a dashing New Zealand captain of Maori troops during the Battle of Crete in 1941. After the war, O’Dwyer becomes a professor of ancient history at Oxford, where he befriends another New Zealander, Mike Newall, twenty years his junior. O’Dwyer doesn’t know that when Newall was a boy in Auckland, he watched a Maori “witch” place a curse on O’Dwyer for shooting a soldier under his command in Crete. Just after O’Dwyer’s death in the late 1990s, Newall, now also a professor at Oxford, spends two days and most of the novel “talking about” the curse, O’Dwyer, and himself with another World War II veteran and Oxford man, Bertie Winterstoke.
As in ancient oral tradition, there are several versions of what happened in 1941. The version O’Dwyer told was that Joe Panapa stepped on a mine during the Allies’ retreat, couldn’t be saved, and asked to be put out of his suffering. The curse was called down on O’Dwyer when he told Panapa’s family this story because he shot Joe in the head, which the Maori consider sacred. The version that Newall discovers near the end of the novel is different, so different that a curse probably wasn’t needed to haunt the rest of O’Dwyer’s days.
Born in 1932, about the time of Newall’s birth, C. K. Stead could not have witnessed the Battle of Crete, but he ably reconstructs a few days of it in chapters that alternate with chapters about Newall’s childhood and recent travels in another war zone, Croatia. O’Dwyer and his men are assigned to protect the airport at Maleme near Chania. Forced to retreat by massive German airstrikes, the New Zealanders are almost overwhelmed by German paratroopers dropped behind Allied lines. The Maori soldiers display unusual heroism, but eventually have to withdraw and be evacuated from the island.
Stead effectively describes the physical setting and emotions of the battle, but allows no cultural contact between the two fierce island warriors, the Maori and Cretans. Although Stead mentions briefly that Cretan civilians used homemade weapons to attack the German paratroopers, he includes nothing about the more interesting long-term cooperation between Allied survivors and Greeks.
Newall supposedly reconstructs battle scenes from Joe Panapa’s letters home, a notebook he kept, and O’Dwyer’s memories decades later. Really, though, it is Stead who takes over the historical narration to give the war chapters concrete immediacy (how olive trees looked, how the dry ground smelled) and personal conflict (dialogue no one could or would have reported). The result is informative about this episode that changed future German tactics and the face of western Crete, but in Talking about O’Dwyer, the Battle of Crete is fought so Stead can turn O’Dwyer’s gun on his own man, and turn Newall’s mind back to those events almost 60 years later.
A life-long academic, Newall envies O’Dwyer’s war experience. When Newall’s marriage breaks up, he makes an impulsive trip to exploding Croatia to become at least an observer of warriors, and to get information for his childhood and college sweetheart, Marica, a Croatian still living in New Zealand. Although death in Crete drives Stead’s plot, the life of Mike Newall is what Stead does best, probably because Newall is a professor, not a soldier. Newall has spent most of his career twiddling with that master linguistic twiddler Wittgenstein, so random violence in Croatia and a young woman he meets there are sufficient simulacra of O’Dwyer’s wartime actions and amorous exploits at Oxford.
The most authentic and lovingly described period of Newall’s life is his youth in New Zealand, where his best friend was a part-Maori named Frano. They wrestle, ride motorcycles, and watch the curse together, but split over Marica, Frano’s cousin and Newall’s love. To Frano, it appears that Mike has commandeered Marica because Mike is of European stock. When Frano either kills himself or dies in a motorcycle accident, Mike feels a life-long “curse” not unlike O’Dwyer’s.
Stead uses a few phrases of Greek and Croatian and includes a glossary of the many Maori words in the novel. I believe he is well-intentioned about his characters’ cultural crossings and conflicts, but the novel is often touristic. Newall visits a war he didn’t observe and drops in on a country he can observe but not understand. Stead makes Newall’s detachment part of the novel’s point, and yet the book, like Newall’s reconstructions and interpretations, remains limited by the author’s distance from his most exciting and demanding material.
Newall tells much of the story to a survivor of Crete, the 80-year-old Winterstoke. He is patient with Newall, and yet the war anecdote Winterstoke narrates, being placed in a closed hold to put out a fire, a suicide mission, is so horrific that it implies a Wittgenstein quote used several times in the book: “What we cannot speak about must be passed over in silence”(37). Newall and Winterstoke struggle to break that silence, work to hear each other over pub noise, fight against fading memory, and identify the cosmic enemy, entropy. To paraphrase Raymond Carver, C. K. Stead has written a “What We Talk About When We Talk About War,” a novel obsessively aware of its own linguistic, as well as experiential, limitations.
At novel’s end, Winterstoke joins Newall and other characters in Chania for the sprinkling of O’Dwyer’s ashes on Joe Panapa’s grave. Newall feels renewed, as his name suggests. But Winterstoke remains a bit detached from the group. That distance is the war veteran’s, the survivor’s, but unintentionally stands for the detachment of the reader – this reader, anyway – from Talking about O’Dwyer. A different title and a different book – say, O’Dwyer in Crete – would perhaps have elicited more attachment from readers of greekworks.com, but that novel would have been devilishly hard to write, demanding even more research and crosscultural imagination from Stead. If you know nothing about the Battle of Crete, Talking about O’Dwyer will be worth the read, even if it’s like sailing past the island on a cruise ship filled with New Zealanders.