Heikki Hietala

Tulagi Hotel is profoundly insightful and surprising, with lyricism that pops up unexpectedly, and scenes of boyish adventure. I gained a look into World War II in a way I never have before, even though my father fought in WWII and was a pilot who flew over China. The characters are so well drawn, I grew quite attached: to Jack and Don and Kay, Martin, Bunny, Doc and Bill, among others.

I noticed comments about the formal dialogue in other reviews. For me, the dialogue worked perfectly. I've read many books written during the thirties, forties, and fifties, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to other, more adult books, and if memory serves, authors routinely used dialogue very much as this author does. I remember thinking how well it worked, because it was one more layer that took me back to that era, made it more authentic. It's casual, yes, it flows well, yet somehow it is a little different from the way dialogue is written these days. For instance, there are more "sirs" than readers see now.

Another thing I really liked was how the author so effortlessly takes us back and forth in time. We go from after the war, into the war proper, to before the war, and back and forth throughout the book. This isn't easy to do well but I never got lost in Tulagi Hotel.

There are lines of pure visual descriptive beauty, such as "His voice had become monochrome and hard, like lacquer on wood." I also loved how Kay's voice made him certain he'd found the answer to a long-gone question: "What do fairies sound like?" And the simple yet evocative "War devours life like a bush fire feasts on dry undergrowth." And yet another: "...by the time the backbone of the Milky Way was supporting all the brilliant stars..." Then also there are such crystalline descriptions that leave one in visual horror, such as "Jack watched as the boy was first hit in the neck with a large piece of shrapnel and then thrown into the air like a scarecrow in a twister. In horror, he watched the kid's head with the helmet still strapped on it fly across the crater, spinning in slow motion..."

The character of Don has many profound insights about life and death: I would imagine anyone who has gone to war would have given such ideas much thought. His theories have really given me pause, especially where he talks about skipping pebbles across the surface of water, and how this correlates to human life and death, memories and holding onto things that cannot be possessed.

The ending is not what I expected at all, not the ending anyone, I think, would expect. I highly recommend this book.… (more)

This is an oddly old fashioned book. If it were a film, it would be in Technicolor, or even black and white, with James Stewart in the lead role.

It’s none the worse for that – in fact the pitch of the story is perfect for the subject: the experiences of a group of American fliers in the Far East during the Second World War. The narrative loops back to visit the hero’s mid-western childhood and zooms forward to describe his return to the Solomon Islands in the late 1940s, but its heart is in the air over the Pacific.

Hietala is impressively expert on the technology and tactics of aerial warfare and he does not back away from its consequences. Characters die horribly; a few survive even more horribly. None of them escape without emotional scarring.

It is this which is the real subject of the novel: how to manage life and attachments when everything could end in a fireball tomorrow. Hietala finds a clever metaphor for the airmen’s refusal to contemplate the future in his hero’s fear of photographs: Jack knows that if he looks at one, he will see the shadows of the friends who are about to die. Sensibly, the author does not take the idea too far – this is not a novel of the occult – but it casts its own fatalistic shadow over much of the story.

This is a man’s book, which probably contributes to its old-fashioned atmosphere. There are two intertwined love stories, but the questions it asks are about how to behave under fire – and there are many kinds of fire to be endured.

Definitely a James Stewart film. John Wayne could do action, but it took James Stewart to convey the darkness and hurt that comes after.… (more)