Pilot Hill Press

... Kevin Roberts has a new book. 
Lions

Lions

Told from the eyes of a small boy and his family in

Adelaide in World War 2, Lions offers both poignant and

comical events which reveal the deep tension and fear of

the relentless Japanese advance towards Australia.

The book questions the nature of males as warriors and

affirms the enduring power of love.

Sometimes, all we know of War is what we see at home.

We don't often give space to a full-length review, but this time we're delighted to feature this review of Kevin's powerful book.

 Book reviews: Lions by Kevin Roberts. Russell McDougall.

Transnational Literature Vol. 7 no. 2, May 2015.

http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html

The Review:

Kevin Roberts is a hyphenated writer: he grew up in Adelaide in South Australia, and is long-term resident of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He’s probably best known in both Canada and Australia as a poet, though he has also published a fair amount of prose fiction. Lions does not say anywhere explicitly that it is autobiographical, but it is persuasively so, fiction or not. It does introduce itself, however, more poetically, as ‘random fragments of the coloured shards of memory shaken in the careless kaleidoscope of time’.

The tale is told from the perspective of a small boy and his family in Adelaide in the latter half of World War 2. Third-person rather than first-person narrative, it seems to hover between personal memory and collective history. It is convincingly true to period, capturing all the social tensions and emotions of the seemingly endless waiting on the inevitable – the relentless advance of the Japanese enemy across the Pacific toward Australia and the bombing of Darwin. It conveys the emotional experience of mothers and children whose husbands and fathers are often fighting on other fronts for much of the time. Yet it is not really a novel of youth, or even of maturation; it is shot through with an older man’s sense of loss, nostalgia, regret and mortality.

There is an existential loneliness to the man’s revisiting the people and places of his boyhood, now that his parents, brothers, aunts and uncles have all gone to their graves. The whole protective family web has been blown away, and the boy is the last man standing,which makes this brief and fragmentary narrative both emotionally complex and compelling. But there is a message here too. If death comes to all, what is the point of war!

Roberts explores the impact of war on women and children, remote from battle yet trapped in its tragedy. But the emotional recoil of this wartime story comes from a rejection of violence as a crucible of masculine identity, by one who has felt firsthand the profound and prolonged damage of it: father lost in New Guinea, missing in action; eldest brother killed in Korea, laid to rest at Kapyong; next eldest missing in action in Vietnam. Only the youngest son survives to visit his mother’s grave in his waning years and confront the pain he has spent his life seeking to avoid. We see the image of that pain in the making on the book’s back cover: a small black-and-white photo of a young boy in a slouch hat, a toy handgun holstered on his hip, a quiver of arrows and bow on his shoulder, and finger on the trigger of a rifle pointed at a target outside the frame – the unknown enemy.

It is the image of a young lion, the boy-warrior and dreamer, who imagines at night the sad and lonely roaring of the lions from the Adelaide Zoo, though it is too far away really for him to hear them. Sixty years later he returns to his old haunts, and to the zoo, where he confronts the image of himself as a man: an aging lion in a ‘false’ concrete den, stretched out on a concrete floor behind thick iron bars, all alone, twitching in his sleep as though in a bad dream. This human-animal neither requires pity nor expects liberty.

We learn a lot about lions along the way: lions in myth, in literature, in art; lions as image, as symbol and as icon. But here is what we really do to lions: we take them captive, enslave them, lock them in cages and then demean them as ‘dirty beasts’. Is this what we also do to men? Men who model themselves as “lions of war, our noblest and our best” (as Christopher Brennan poeticised the warrior breed) are, as Roberts shows them, trapped and deluded. So are the lions of industry, or those of any other domain where the conquistadorial ego seeks to dominate. But, in reality, a man like this ‘is a wandering escape artist haunted by his childhood and avoiding any commitment to his own family. ... He is good at excuses. Even manages to convince himself’.

Who is this man – the man who sees through that man? It is the same man, older, wiser,wounded, stripped of excuses, a writer of ‘beautiful lies’ who has learned through hard labour the cost of truth. If there is healing, it is outside the frame.

Russell McDougall