Novel set in 1942 INDONESIA

23rd November 2023

Sisters Under the Rising Sun by Heather Morris, novel set in 1942 INDONESIA.

#audiobook

Singapore is falling as the Japanese make their way to the Southern tip of Malaya and those who can flee are doing so. Norah Chambers ensures her daughter Sally has a chance of safety and sends her off with her aunt on a ship. She soon follows on the HMS Vyner Brooke, which is torpedoed just 2 days after setting sail. On board is Norah, an Australian nurse and the story evolves largely through the experiences of these two women. The novel is based on the actual experiences of women who were interned at that time.

They find themselves in Mentok, where the Japanese have already set up a POW camp. The horrors of incarceration are only just beginning.

The author captures the bravery of the women assembled there and their determination not to be brow beaten and humiliated by their captors. Bonding over music and comradeship, the spirits of the internees are bolstered, despite the deprivations and hardships they must endure.

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The TV show TENKO, which aired in UK in the early 1980s set the bar very high for drama set in this period and describes similar circumstances to those in the novel. It portrayed the mistreatment of women in SE Asia, – based on true stories – which until that point had been poorly documented. In the novel, the author has chosen people, who in real life were also held captive by the Japanese and the book is clearly a tribute to the many amazing women who survived the ordeal. Tenko had passion and memorable characters but Sisters Under the Rising Sun is over-populated – no doubt the author had to include great swathes of people – which made it feel a little fractured. I felt almost as though the events were happening inside a goldfish bowl and I couldn’t quite grasp the power of emotion and fear, which clearly must have abounded. I felt distanced from their plight. This was further underlined by the narrator of the audiobook, who enunciated very clearly but never really modulated her voice – to such an extent that my mind kept wandering to other things. The delivery felt like a stream of consciousness, there was no power and range in her articulation and when the Vyner Brooke went down, there was no urgency or undulation (she could have been listing items on a shelf, it felt that lacklustre).

So, my task was to try and assess the quality of the writing and storytelling, without succumbing to the soporific rendering of the story by the narrator. It was hard. As a package, it didn’t really float my boat (pardon the pun). But all credit to the author for shining a light on a brave set of women who endured much.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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