FICTION
To Sing of War
Catherine McKinnon, HarperCollins, $32.99

History is instructive, if nothing else: it belongs to a classroom along with the desks and chairs. We know that we should learn its lessons, have a sense of it, so that we aren’t one of those unfortunate souls doomed to repeat it. Myth, on the other hand, tends away from the didactic and towards the airy, rarefied realm of literature. W. B. Yeats saw his lover better in light of Helen of Troy; Louise Glück drew on Persephone and Demeter to write about being a mother and a daughter; James Joyce made his own Ulysses.

Catherine McKinnon’s new novel, To Sing of War, consciously situates itself as a work that straddles history and myth. Its title comes from the first line of The Aeneid, while the story sprawls across 400 pages, three continents, and six narrators to chronicle the last years of World War II. While there is no shortage of historical detail, McKinnon is interested less in this particular conflict than conflict writ large – in the betrayals and suffering and cruelties that link stories of war from Homer to Hemingway to now.

To Sing of War is not an adaptation of The Aeneid, but instead a novel that pays regular tribute to Virgil’s epic. The most prominent of these references is the portentously named Virgil Nicholson, an Australian soldier who serves in the jungles of New Guinea, where he alternates between anticipating Japanese soldiers and pining for Lotte, a nurse back at home camp.

Interwoven with their narrative are the lives of the scientists developing the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos: Robert Oppenheimer struggles to maintain support for his project, while scientists Mim and Fred wrestle with their own moral compunctions – and libertine inclinations – in an atmosphere of paranoid secrecy. Adding to this already-full list is Hiroko, a Japanese woman working to ensure her daughter’s safety in imperial Japan.

Even as her characters’ lives are subject to the greater historical forces around them, McKinnon maintains a close focus on their personal lives: Oppenheimer’s scientific work receives far less attention than his increasingly strained marriage; the strategic situation of Papua New Guinea in WWII is only the background for the camaraderie and tensions within Virgil’s troops.

Often, the novel will turn away from the events of history entirely, staring off at the wildlife of a mesa or lingering on a haiku. In the balance of the narrative, the Japanese strands receive particularly short shrift: characters tend to speak a stilted, exoticised “translationese” (“Our kamikaze pilots will cause destruction. Success is soon”), and seem to exist only to seek shelter in Nagasaki and become victims of historical irony.

It is this sense of inevitability that drags the latter half of the novel, which has suspense only for the readers wondering whether Oppenheimer will develop his bomb. Of course, it would be less of an issue if we could concentrate less on the war and more how it is sung.