The 51th review 44th BOOK "Bamboo Heart by Ann Bennett"

This book is very good, this book has an amazing story that can interest the reader. And I have read this book more than once. You should read this book! By Rifaldi Fauzan

Ann Bennett’s Bamboo Heart begins with Tom Ellis, a captive of the Japanese working on the Death Railway in 1943, in solitary confinement. It is in these opening pages and the narrow confines of his pit prison that we learn what gives him the will to live. Tucked in his chest pocket is a photograph of a young Eurasian woman from Penang, Joy De Souza – this is but one of the threads in Bennett’s first installment of her WWII trilogy.

Bennett has given us a hybrid of sorts with alternating narratives between Tom Ellis and Laura Ellis, his daughter, a lawyer living in London in 1986. Tom’s narrative involves several non-linear time-splits of his pre-war life as a lawyer in London living out days of drudgery, and then as a young man managing a rubber plantation in Penang. Here we get a real sense of Tom’s paradisiacal life in colonial Malaya – you can almost taste the gin sling on your lips; and we also learn of Tom’s love affairs, first with a married British socialite and then with a young Eurasian school teacher. The delicacies of the latter relationship in 1943 are not lost on the author as Tom naively tries to take Joy, whom he is courting, to the Penang club where it is an unspoken rule to only serve Europeans.

Even when Tom joins the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, training on an old playing field after work, practicing rifle handling with broom handles (there were no rifles) there is a sense that nothing will ever break the cycle of tennis matches, dinner parties and drinks at the club: “There was usually a certain kind of bonhomie during training, but the news from Europe and the steady build-up of British forces on the Malay Peninsula tempered their sense that this was all just a jolly jape.