Daniel McKay. <i>Beyond Hostile Islands. The Pacific War in American and New Zealand Fiction Writing</i>

Beyond Hostile Islands examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the Pacific War: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issues pivot around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the “tyranny of distance,” Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term “ideological coproduction” to describe how a territorially and demographically smaller national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in ways that reflect the historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in a wide variety of locales, including Bougainville, Kwajalein Atoll, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Solomon Islands, among others. The book concludes with a deliberately open-ended pose, in the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided in turn by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.

Daniel McKay, the author of Beyond Hostile Islands, is an associate professor of English at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico. His book is a kind of literature review with a twist. It is a comparison of the fictional literature of American and New Zealand authors and their fictional interpretations of World War Two in the Pacific, focused on literary works dealing with combat novels, post-war Japan-bashing, Japanese internment, the memoirs of those who were captives of the Japanese, and novels about the development of the atomic bomb. It is a pioneering effort investigating connections between memory and literary studies. This reviewer finds the study intriguing but not fully convincing, as will be discussed more fully below. The work will be helpful to those already familiar with its themes and literary theories but may be difficult to comprehend for the uninitiated.

Daniel McKay’s contribution to comparative literary studies and war literature is more than significant in Beyond Hostile Lands. The Pacific War in American and New Zealand Fiction Writing as it opens up new lines of inquiry that may reconsider the broader implications of the Pacific War in literature outside the scope of Eurocentric or American-centric frameworks. Hence, the author’s comparative approach enriches the reader’s understanding of the literature of countries as disparate as New Zealand and the United States and provides a unique perspective on the legacy of this conflict in our cultural memory. This book might be thought-provoking for those with previous knowledge of the field, especially in the intersections between literature and war. However, it is also an excellent book for graduate and postgraduate students willing to delve into the literary canon of the Pacific War.

Sacrificing the Subject: The Pacific War in American & New Zealand Fiction Writing

The value of Daniel McKay’s Beyond Hostile Islands, a study of treatments of the Pacific War in fiction from the United States and New Zealand, is its range. McKay follows master narratives and images from war writing across decades, and through archives many readers are unlikely to look in or move between.

The 1920s and 1930s were a fertile period for Japanese detective fiction. The genre, which enjoyed its first spurt of popularity in the 1880s and 1890s with the pioneering translations of Western detective stories by journalist turned-translator Kuroiwa Ruiko (1862-1920), had since developed a strong following, especially among urban youth, as the literary exemplar of urbane modernity. Magazines devoted to detective fiction proliferated as stories of sensational murders and brilliant deductions found their way into the literary mainstream. Shinseinen [New youth] (1920-50), for example, the most fashionable general interest magazine of the time, regularly published Japanese translations of Western detective fiction and original stories by native authors not only in its regular issues but also in its biannual supple mental issues.1 The genre continued to thrive until the late 1930s when changes in the political climate and Japans increased involvement in continental affairs made it difficult for authors and publishers to justify works portraying immoral or decadent acts of crime and intrigue that ran counter to the ideology of the state. By the start of the Pacific War, the genre entered a period of creative hibernation not only because of the increased reach of censorship but also the increased pressure for self-censorship. Although the consumption of detective fiction persisted, the production of new works, both original and translated, waned. Some authors lent their talents to the war effort, while others stopped writing altogether. The end of World War II brought detective fiction writers back to the genre to pick up where they had left off. When describing the status of the genre in the immediate postwar period, critics unanimously point out

This article reviews and compares the literary fictions of the United States and New Zealand, as they have sought to respond to the ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. During the period in question, approximately 100,000 United States Army and Marine Corps servicemen landed and resided in New Zealand, where they undertook final preparations for the island campaigns of the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, American fiction writers wrote of the social and cultural difficulties endured by New Zealand civilians, but New Zealand writers took longer to come to terms with the events.