The Caprices

The Caprices is Sabina Murray's first collection of stories, nine of them, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. All nine turn on the Second World War in the Pacific, though some look back on it from decades later, and between them they move across Southeast Asia, the United States and Australia. Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines; her mother was a child in Manila during the Japanese occupation, and her paternal grandfather and uncle were imprisoned and never heard from again. "Think of war as the hostile pebble thrown into the peaceful pond," Murray said in an interview. "I'm writing about the ripples."

The ripples reach a long way. In "Guinea" an Italian American soldier and an Irish Bostonian try to stay alive in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner in their charge. In "Order of Precedence" Lieutenant Harry Gillen, an Indian officer in the British Army, is starving in a prisoner of war camp when he meets his former commander, Major Berystede, who is dying, and the story reaches back to Gillen's polo playing days and a whites only officers' club. "Folly" imagines the last days of Amelia Earhart, and in "Colossus" an aging American veteran looks back on the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and the death march that followed. The title story, which Murray says in her foreword could just as well be set in peacetime, finds a once wealthy family living in the shell of its grand house in occupied Manila, guarding a girl named Trinidad and trying not to draw the notice of the Japanese soldiers.

This is a hard book in the plain sense. Debra Spark, writing in Ploughshares, called the stories "first and foremost about the ironies, humiliations, and brutalities of war," and Murray does not look away from starvation, disease and death. What keeps it readable is her control: the stories are tight, they jump between past and present without warning, and Publishers Weekly noted that she "also handles humor with laudable finesse." Claire Messud, in The New York Times Book Review, admired its "intriguingly ragged efficiency." It suits readers who want the war in the Pacific seen from the edges, through colonial subjects, prisoners and civilians rather than generals.