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- Contents Category: Fiction
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- Article Title: The Rainy Season
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Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.
- Book 1 Title: The Rainy Season
- Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $32.95 pb, 323 pp, 9780670072125
- Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
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The prose is quick and light; The Rainy Season is a diverting read. Jones, who worked in Saigon in the 1990s, brings Saigon to life: the urban chaos, the stench and grime of poverty, the sickening humidity. There are wonderful scenes around the city, the bustling night fish market, particularly.
Ella’s memories of war – for they are vivid and tangible strands of consciousness – make for potent analysis: they are horrors, both guiding and disturbing, that are reimagined through visual and cinematic recreation: photographs and also films such as Full Metal Jacket (1987) and The Deer Hunter (1978). Ella has no primary sources; she knows almost nothing of her father’s experience. When she encounters another veteran in the nearby care, he is antagonistic and obscene.
The poignancy of The Rainy Season is generated not so much through the absent father but in the breakdown in communication, over the years, between mother and daughter. Their fractured relationship is an enduring trauma of the war.
The fact that Ella could not bring herself to ask her mother the simple question ‘What happened to my father’? is moving for its earnestness and emotional authenticity.
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