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My Name is Jimmy
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My Name is Jimmy, by Garrick Jones
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Thank you very much, Ulysses. Your review made my day :-)
By Garrick Jones
MoshPit Publishing, 2022
5 stars
This is a long short story, or a novella; but it packs the punch of a novel. Like most of Garrick Jones’s work, there is an educational factor to this book, especially for an American reader. We have never been taught anything about Australia’s role in either of the world wars. In particular, we were certainly never taught that the Japanese bombed Darwin, Australia, even more destructively than they did the USA’s Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii.
That’s really just the context for this story of vengeance against an unexpected enemy.
Jimmy is a young man, still recovering mentally from his long years serving the Allies in World War II. As part of his road to recovery, he heads up to the distant Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, and the most isolated capital city in the world. It is in Darwin he hopes to find the grave of his childhood best friend, killed in the bombing of Darwin in February, 1942.
When Jimmy gets to Darwin (a long, long process back then), he finds two things. First, there’s something fishy about his friend Sandy’s death; and secondly, there’s a man named Gordon who sparks something in Jimmy’s humanity that he’s not felt since before the war.
As always, Jones’s writing is tight, journalistic, with just the right edge to make you realize that this would make a great little movie. In a generation before any concept of gay rights emerged anywhere on the planet, Jones’s characters exemplify the ways in which men inclined to other men continued to make their way – and even find happiness – when the situational effects of wartime had passed.
The bottom line here is that not all the evil done during wars is done by the people you’re supposedly fighting. Evil is apolitical and amoral. It is sparked by greed and arrogance. Jimmy becomes sort of a small-town superhero. Not the kind of war story my generation was raised to expect – which just makes it all the more welcome.