The Daughters of Mars
Thomas Kenneally is best known for SCHINDLER’S LIST, but if you’re expecting more of the same from THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS, you won’t get it. For one thing DAUGHTERS is more fictionalized. It’s about the two Durance sisters, Naomi and Sally who enlist in the Australian nurses’ corps.
At first the two don’t seem to like each other. You see, they’re from “The Bush” and Naomi left to work in the big city, leaving Sally to take care of their parents. This proved to be more than she could handle when her mother came down with cancer. Her mother was in so much pain that she wanted to die. Sally began to save small amounts of morphine, which Naomi found. Sally assumed Naomi gave it to their mother, because she died. Sally can’t get over the guilt she feels.
The two girls wind up on a hospital ship helping the wounded men at the ill-conceived front in the Dardenelles, Gallipoli. Kenneally provides many twists and turns you won’t expect. One of the first is the torpedoing of the hospital ship. Their matron (head nurse) Mitchie loses her leg in the aftermath. She’s sent home as is Naomi for disobeying orders. There are several themes throughout the story that have little to do with war, and the reason Naomi is sent home is one of them. The orderlies and the colonel in charge of Naomi and Sally’s unit don’t respect women, making it harder to do their jobs. One of the good guys is an orderly named Sergeant Kearnan, a Quaker who will assume a larger role later in the story. He, along with Naomi, take charge of the lifeboat the nurses end up in.
Eventually the two girls are sent to France, Sally as a regular in the nurses’ corps, and Naomi as a volunteer in the hospital founded by Lady Tarlton, whose husband was a politician in Australia. One-legged Mitchie also makes it back working with Tarlton as one of her right-hand men. There’s another twist involving Lady Tarlton’s driver that results in the loss of one of our principal characters. There’s also a flu epidemic that affects the story. If you’ve studied WWI at all, you know that influenza killed almost as many soldiers as did bullets, bombs, and artillery. The girls, especially Sally, stick with pretty much the same clique of nurses throughout the novel. There’s taciturn Freud who can handle most anything except being raped by one of the young soldiers. There’s Honora, the funny one who suffers a loss that jars her sense of humor; Leonora, the pretty one, and Nettice who falls in love with a blind young captain. Both girls have a love life also, and both of their men are affected either physically or by war time idiocy.
Just when things look their worst, Australian divisions arrive to save the day. There’s very little mention of the Americans, and none of Black Jack Pershing. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the book is the ending. One of the sisters succumbs to influenza but one of the Australian papers gets it wrong; We don’t know which one died. Keneally begins to tell us which one survived, then pulls the old switcheroo, which might annoy the reader.
This book is not as good as SCHINDLER’S LIST, but it does support William Tecumseh Sherman’s saying, “War is hell.”
At first the two don’t seem to like each other. You see, they’re from “The Bush” and Naomi left to work in the big city, leaving Sally to take care of their parents. This proved to be more than she could handle when her mother came down with cancer. Her mother was in so much pain that she wanted to die. Sally began to save small amounts of morphine, which Naomi found. Sally assumed Naomi gave it to their mother, because she died. Sally can’t get over the guilt she feels.
The two girls wind up on a hospital ship helping the wounded men at the ill-conceived front in the Dardenelles, Gallipoli. Kenneally provides many twists and turns you won’t expect. One of the first is the torpedoing of the hospital ship. Their matron (head nurse) Mitchie loses her leg in the aftermath. She’s sent home as is Naomi for disobeying orders. There are several themes throughout the story that have little to do with war, and the reason Naomi is sent home is one of them. The orderlies and the colonel in charge of Naomi and Sally’s unit don’t respect women, making it harder to do their jobs. One of the good guys is an orderly named Sergeant Kearnan, a Quaker who will assume a larger role later in the story. He, along with Naomi, take charge of the lifeboat the nurses end up in.
Eventually the two girls are sent to France, Sally as a regular in the nurses’ corps, and Naomi as a volunteer in the hospital founded by Lady Tarlton, whose husband was a politician in Australia. One-legged Mitchie also makes it back working with Tarlton as one of her right-hand men. There’s another twist involving Lady Tarlton’s driver that results in the loss of one of our principal characters. There’s also a flu epidemic that affects the story. If you’ve studied WWI at all, you know that influenza killed almost as many soldiers as did bullets, bombs, and artillery. The girls, especially Sally, stick with pretty much the same clique of nurses throughout the novel. There’s taciturn Freud who can handle most anything except being raped by one of the young soldiers. There’s Honora, the funny one who suffers a loss that jars her sense of humor; Leonora, the pretty one, and Nettice who falls in love with a blind young captain. Both girls have a love life also, and both of their men are affected either physically or by war time idiocy.
Just when things look their worst, Australian divisions arrive to save the day. There’s very little mention of the Americans, and none of Black Jack Pershing. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the book is the ending. One of the sisters succumbs to influenza but one of the Australian papers gets it wrong; We don’t know which one died. Keneally begins to tell us which one survived, then pulls the old switcheroo, which might annoy the reader.
This book is not as good as SCHINDLER’S LIST, but it does support William Tecumseh Sherman’s saying, “War is hell.”
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