Five years ago, B.C. author Adam Lewis Schroeder published a stunning first collection of short fiction. The stories in Kingdom of Monkeys showed an amazing range; they were technically sophisticated, darkly funny, strangely moving, full of interesting and compelling characters, and set in beautiful and exotic surroundings. With this evidence in hand, reviewers and readers had every reason to believe that they were present at the debut of one of the next great Canadian talents. Expectations for a first novel were high. It is those expectations, in part, that make Schroeder’s Empress of Asia such a bizarre and heartbreaking disappointment.

The book starts with a familiar plot. Harry Winslow, a retired car salesman in his seventies, is visiting his wife Lily’s hospital bed, watching her wither away. From her deathbed, Lily reveals a long-held secret that sends her husband halfway around the world on a quest that will ultimately bring his life deeper meaning and force him to reconsider the things he thought he knew about his spouse.

That story, by itself, could have made an excellent book. It would not have been as strange and wonderful as the plots and situations in Kingdom of Monkeys, but Schroeder has an excellent feel for place and the complex bonds that tie people together, and that might have been enough. The problem is that this story forms only the bookends for the long middle section of the novel, a tedious and unfocused
recounting of Harry’s adventures in the Second World War.

Here is one week from Harry’s war: he is in two shipwrecks, has a whirlwind romance in Singapore in a stolen tuxedo, gets married (but does not manage to consummate the marriage), is thrown into a POW camp complete with appalling violence, pointless work, and a trip through a dysentery ward, escapes from the camp in a stolen truck, and finally winds up feasting on bat meat with local farmers while on the lam. During this week he is rescued in turn by an Australian gunboat, the Japanese navy, and Indonesian communists. The last of these kindly put him out to sea in a flimsy raft filled with coconuts, bananas, a guy named after one of Napoleon’s top marshals, a big purple fish that looks like Mackenzie King, and a doomed seagull named Connie. This is not a farce. Nor is it allegory. This is all told in a thoroughly straight-up manner, and yet it exceeds the bounds of credibility at several points.

The choice of the unsinkable Harry Winslow as the narrator was probably Schroeder’s fundamental mistake. This is a man so lacking in curiosity that, by his own admission, he didn’t poke through his wife’s underwear drawer once in 50 years. The extent of his sense of humour is that he knows two very bad knock-knock jokes. He is not prone to careful observation or introspection, and if he even has a personal set of beliefs, it doesn’t extend much beyond a long-lasting hatred of the Japanese. There is nothing charming, interesting, or compelling about this character, and as a narrator he lacks the ability to hold the reader’s attention. He possesses no sense of the dramatic and little emotional depth. He can tell you that he loves Fats Waller, and provide an encyclopaedic list of his recordings, but he lacks the vocabulary to convey the joy of listening to this music.

Now, it just so happens that those qualities of Harry’s are essential to the story. Lily makes it clear that a more observant or curious person would have discovered her secret many years ago. The problem is not that Schroeder can’t write this guy – he has nailed Harry’s voice and produced something very authentic. The problem is that the authentic Harry is dull, and despite his numerous adventures, there is no way for the reader to become invested in the outcome of his story.

This is a book that is obviously quite well researched, and it does bring something unique to Canadian literature in the sense that there are very few Canadian stories that recount experiences in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War. Canadian soldiers didn’t really serve there in any kind of numbers, so putting a merchant sailor in Singapore and sinking his ship was one of the few ways to enter this story and produce something with a Canadian perspective. But Schroeder never finds a focus for Harry’s story and never finds the time to really explore any one aspect of this historic era. What we wind up with is a picaresque, minus the humour and social satire that the form demands.

In the end, through 50-plus years of marriage, we see Harry and Lily together only three different times: the day they marry, the day they are both released from concentration camps, and the day Lily dies. It is not nearly enough. The story of this marriage and the secret it holds, which could have been the anchor of the book, gets lost and winds up feeling tacked on.