Madeleine Thien. Certainty

Madeleine Thien. Certainty. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. 320 pp. $32.99 hc. $21.00 sc. In Canada, World War II is usually remembered as a European war. When Remembrance Day comes round, it is footage of Canadians fighting in Italy and Normandy that dominates the television specials. But for many Asian Canadians, what looms largest in memory is not the conflict in Europe but events in the Pacific theatre: the Japanese colonization of Korea and Manchuria, and the advance of the Japanese army through South East Asia. Three recent Canadian novels, Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden, Kerri Sakamoto's One Hundred Million Hearts, and Rui Umezawa's The Truth about Death and Dying, look at World War II from an Asian perspective. So too does Madeleine Thien's new novel Certainty. Although much of Thien's novel takes place in contemporary Vancouver, the central event (inasmuch as Certainty has one) occurs during the Japanese retreat from Borneo in 1945. Matthew Lin, then a young boy, sees his father murdered by the Japanese troops. His childhood sweetheart, Ani, is left an orphan by the chaos of war. These wartime losses cannot be forgotten or left behind, even though Matthew ultimately emigrates to Canada, and Ani ends up living in the Netherlands. Certainty is nothing if not ambitious. It tackles serious themes -- war, grief, race, memory, AIDS. Its canvas is large: the settings include Vancouver, Sandakan (in Borneo), Jakarta, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands. So too is the cast of characters: Matthew and his wife, Clara, their daughter, Gail, and her husband, Ansel, Ani and her husband, Sipke. The novel spans more than fifty years, but it is not presented in chronological order. Divided into nine sections, each of which begins in a specific rime and place, Certainty shuttles constantly among its varied settings and time frames. However, Certainty, for all its ambition and complexity, is thin. A major problem is that it has no compelling central character. Gail, Matthew's Canadian-born child, would seem the logical anchor; she is the one who investigates the past and struggles to understand its effect on the present. But Gail is already dead when the novel begins, a youthful victim of pneumonia. There are sections that deal with her relationship with Ansel and her career as a radio producer; the sections set in the Netherlands, to which Gail travels to find out about her father's past with Ani, feature Gail as focalizer. But Gail has neither enough substance nor prominence to hold the novel together. A second problem is that there is not much in the way of plot. Thien introduces a diary written in code by a Canadian POW during his years in a Japanese POW camp. …

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