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Each in His Lonely Night
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by:
ISBN:
0-7414-3973-5
©2007
Price:
$14.95
Book Size:
5.5'' x 8.5''
, 226 pages
Category/Subject:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
This is a memoir woven from my Australian parents’ love letters. Joining the British Colonial service in Malaya, they lived there through the romantic 1930s until Japan invaded in 1941.
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Abstract:
Opening a suitcase after the death of her parents, a daughter finds bundles of love letters covering their early courtship, their romantic life in British Malaya, their separation during the War and their parting by death.
Stifled by colonial life in remote backwaters, the letters reveal her rebelling mother indulged in affairs. When Japan invaded, her mother escaped, but her father was captured and sent to Thailand. After anguished years of waiting, postcards arrived confirming her father’s survival.
Her parents returned to Malaya, retiring a decade later, only to have her father die. Her mother lived on for thirty lonely years.
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Customer Reviews
 
A Compelling and Well-Crafted Study of Two Lives in Paradox
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05/27/2009
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Reviewer:
Robert Cardinalli, Jan, 2008
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Catharine Cool has written a profound character and relationship study that encapsulates a time and space of the mid-20th century and a personal modality of communication that, as one can observe, has been lost lost to the art of instant text messaging and free-to-air telephone calling from the top of Annapurna. One should not be fooled by mobile telephony into thinking there are no longer distances between people, as the Nokia admen would have us all believe. In the story of this unique couple, distance (physical and emotional) was often the third partner in the marriage. An underlying subtext of this story is that non-conformity in the marriage was the reason for its success and that it survived affairs and differing interests speaks to us of the toleration, forgiveness and understanding that is lacking in many human relationships.
The author was initially instigated by a set of letters and notes first encountered in the last period of her mother's life when the latter wove in and out of lucidity in a hospice world of shadows shrouded by forces of memory and glimpses of familiar faces. Although the book professes to be about both parents, in fact, it is Charlotte, the mother, whose persona dominates every page and haunts the proceedings. Cool indicates Charlotte's admission of her personal history, but clearly the subject is far too complex, painful and personal for Charlotte to cope with at that point in her cancer. There is about Charlotte a sense of recognizing the guilt of connubial betrayal at a time pre-WWII and after, when the world was an uncertain place and the survival of kith and kin on everyone's mind. The reader comes away from this experience with a belief that Charlotte was impelled by emotions not entirely under her control, and that the forces of regret probably would not have prevented a repetition had circumstances come her way. In that sense, Charlotte was a woman liberated from the shackles of post-Edwardian convention but sufficiently a product of her era to have suffered the guilt expected by society. It is the kind of guilt the Roman Catholic church has turned into a cottage industry---and, to think, all this, and Charlotte was not even a Catholic. In fact, there is no indication at all that either her behavior or attitude toward life was propelled by any kind religious dogma. On the contrary, it is Charlotte's husband, from whose character emanates a profound ethic (Christian, or even Buddhist or Islamic, take your pick) of supposed tolerance, forgiveness and accommodation. The book's chapters alternate between portions of the parents' nuanced, forthright letters and notes, and daughter Catharine Cool's more objective recounting of the facts in the lives of her parents.
Reading this work in the icy early jet-lagged morning hours after many hours suffering the indignities of international trans-oceanic air travel, I was taken to another time and world, captivated by the account of these two lives, and how each in his and her own way, became what we now refer to as a Hemingway Hero, maintaining diginity and decorum under the grind and scrutiny of external pressures. Charlotte is portrayed as a temperamental, multifaceted, and deeply emotional woman who followed the dictates of her heart and defied the conventions of her era to the extent she sublimated these internal forces to what many today would regard as an alarming degree. As her letters and notes reveal, Charlotte was a very human, not always self-honest (e.g. in professing that the extra-marital encounters meant nothing to her) and driven individual who was conscious of her moral and ethical weaknesses. Her husband was steadfast, driven by a need to excel, and who appeared to be more committed to the conventions of the time regarding family, marriage, social and professional obligations. Throughout their lives they managed to straddle a great number of seeming paradoxes. The writer has demonstrated through the telling of her parents' relationship, that many Western conventions concerning love, marriage, parenthood, sexuality, and friendship are as not as tightly circumscribed as most would generally like to believe.
The couple lived a fascinating life in exotic environs, an adventurous colonial life, that for most sahibs and memsahibs of the time often and quite precipitously, deteriorated into a dull routine of ordering the servants and planning lavish and wasteful dinner parties. For this married couple, their life was clearly an adventure. Charlotte lived the last 30 years of her without her mate, but with her charm, wit, intelligence and yes, beguiling sexual presence, men, women and children continued to be taken by her, as was I, as though for Charlotte, the great adventure was never over.
Each in His Lonely Night is an eloquent examination of the possibilties and limitations of marriage as it occurs in our culture today. The story illuminates the intimate mechanics of a most unusual relationship, a marriage in which each partner has varying distractions on the side, but to which each returns as a ship to its home port. A reading of this portrait puts to shame the base, simplistic rhetoric so often bandied about around marriage, sexuality, and relationships, and instead allows the reader clearly to see into the complex and wonderful world of two vital, though not always exceptional, people in love. And what is remarkable about Cool's writing is that she makes telling the truth about relationships seem so easy and natural, demonstrating that in writing a personal history often the best thing an author can do is to step out of the way.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
To Read Her Words Is To Know Her Heart, November 16, 2007
By
MEg Gavin "MEg"
(California) - See all my reviews
This author talks to you and takes you to another time and place that you as her reader will never get to visit. Her eloquent story telling is smooth, as if she was in the room with you. Reading this author will enlighten your soul.
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