The Daughters of Mars

Australia, 1915: the sisters Naomi and Sally Durance volunteer to serve as nurses in the First World War; from Alexandria, Egypt, they are first shipped to Gallipoli, and later serve near the front line in France.

As short as the synopsis is, the novel with its 500+ pages subjects the reader to the whole gamut of emotions, and I felt an immense solidarity with those two brave and spirited women, maybe not least because I used to work as a nurse myself – though of course in rather less harrowing circumstances. Naomi and Sally are complex figures, and I warmed to them the more the novel progressed as they, by their own admission, used to come across as 'aloof' before the war changed them. Supporting characters are also well drawn and I show more became invested in all of their fates, shedding the odd tear here and there when someone or other didn't make it to the end of the novel. What impressed me most about the book were the numerous depictions of individual acts of true heroism away from the front line – front line action doesn't feature at all except for reports by the soldiers – that to me were incredibly moving; these are the unsung heroes of the war.

As well as portraying the horrors of war in quite graphic and often terrifying detail, but often beautiful prose, the novel also depicts how as a result of the fighting gender and class divisions were loosened if not completely broken down at times in those involved in caring for the soldiers, allowing women in particular a certain freedom of speech and action they didn't otherwise possess. In addition, the book holds up a magnifying glass to society and examines issues of politics such as the question of conscription and the women's suffrage movement that was entirely unexpected but received with interest and gratitude. The reason it doesn't quite get the full five stars is that I felt the pace was dropped a little too much in places after the tension-filled action sequences; others may argue that this is just what is needed to balance the two.

In short, the novel shows the best and worst humanity is capable of and it will stay with you for a long time once the last page has been turned; as such it is a book to be savoured, treasured and re-read. show less

This turned out to be one of the best works of fiction that I have read this year, and one that was impossible to put down until it was over.

At the heart of the book are the two Durance girls (yes, the name is clearly well chosen, and the near-pun nodded at early on in the narrative and then discarded), both of whom are nurses and both of whom volunteer to go off to war, first to Gallipoli and Alexandria, and then the Western Front. The Durance girls are ill at ease with each other, with tensions of various kinds underpinning their relationship, but in extremis they form new and to the reader very moving bonds. None of this is sentimentalized or easy, any more than are their relationships with those around them. The Durance girls, it is show more said of them, are cool and aloof, and whether it's shyness, reserve or something else, forming close ties with others simply isn't something they do readily. War brings them to life by bringing to them a sense of purpose even as it creates in them a sense of despair. "Young men were smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again," Naomi Durance muses.

Overall, this is probably one of the most impressive novels I have read about war that isn't about conflict itself, but rather life on the fringes of war and dealing with its detritus. "There's no rest for anyone until it's all over," one character points out testily later in the novel. "Unless it's the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme." That's the tone throughout: even dealing with events and topics that would lead a lesser writer to bog down in sentimental claptrap, Keneally's tone remains wry, replete with this kind of very real, vivid and ironic humor. When the Durance girls and their fellow nurses form romantic relationships, that isn't a cue for hearts and flowers or tragic melodrama; courtship is understated and formal and all the more convincing for that. There is a sense that these people have been brought by the horrors of war to understand what it is that is important and what is peripheral.

Keneally's writing is pitch perfect, and so often exactly the kind of deadpan pragmatism that I tend to associate with Australians. "There are only two choices, you know," Naomi tells her sister Sally at one point. "Either die or live well. We live on behalf of thousands who don't. Millions. So let's not mope about it, eh?" That kind of relentless unsentimentality, coupled with the author's ability to capture so vividly the realities of warfare and wartime nursing a century ago, is awe-inspiring in a book of this kind.

A must-read. Every year I find a very, very small handful of books that I want to jump up and down and celebrate and insist that everyone else read. This is one of 'em for 2013. If you're remotely interested in the topic, the author or the type of narrative, miss it at your peril. show less

”She could hear the bombers now, in amongst the background thunder of guns, the Archies close by and the seamless rage of the barrage at the front. She waited a second and then placed her head in a groove between two stone moldings and began to shudder at the awful perversion of things---of sky not permitted to be sky, of air not permitted to be air.” (Page 465)

I’ve been doing a lot of WWI reading this year, both fiction and non-fiction, and Thomas Keneally’s powerful novel has come close to being the perfect vehicle for making me feel as though I am actually among the war participants. Keneally chose to focus his attention on the story of two Australians, the Durrance sisters, who volunteer as nurses in first, Gallipoli and show more Lemnos and later in the bloodbath known as the Western Front, like thousands of other Australian women who served in hospital ships and triage stations very near the front. The fact that Sally and Naomi carry an uneasy secret that has served to keep them at odds adds another element of narrative conflict that only serves to heighten the interest.

Keneally maintains a steadily increasing sense of horror as the chapters tick by, and the bodies pile up. His descriptions of the sinking of the hospital ship, Archimedes, by a German U-boat, had me holding my breath as his evocative powers enthralled. The man has an astute sense of pacing. And as the ship’s occupants gamely try to escape the ship, Keneally gives us this:

”Sally’s boat---descending by its hausers---now picked up too much downward speed. Looking over the gunwales she saw that because of the growing steepness of the deck her sister’s boat had swung in part below hers and had stuck in place, dipping unevenly. A mere instant later it dropped hectically and splashed into the sea. The ship was nose down and Sally saw that her boat would slam the stern of her sister’s and Mitchie’s unless it could be detached from its hawsers and rowed clear. Still attached to the Archimedes by its thick cables, the boat below them---with her sister in it---now turned crazily beam on and crosswise.” (Page 135)

At the same time, the strained relationship between the sisters seems to improve amid the chaos until they face up to the demon that’s between them and find resolution and that long sought commodity, love.

There’s so much going on in this very powerful look at WWI through the eyes of those not directly at the front, but within a stone’s throw of the carnage that all I can do is urge you to look for it sooner rather than later. Not everyone is going to be thrilled with the very cryptic ending but for me it was brilliant. Very highly recommended. show less

I came to this after reading many books about the Western Front written by people who were actually there, and part of me found it difficult to adjust to a modern literary treatment. It struck me suddenly – unfairly – as distasteful to turn these events into the material of a story. And so I was looking hard for some kind of thematic purpose to talking about 1914–1918 beyond just using it as a source of dramatic incident.

What this book is going for is a sense of sweeping grandeur, an epic scope that reaches from dusty Australian farmsteads to the Gallipoli landings to the industrialised slaughter of the trenches. I wanted to like it, and there are some wonderful setpieces including the best shipwreck scene I can remember reading. show more I also (apparently unlike other reviews) quite liked the two central characters, sisters from New South Wales who join the war effort as nurses. It made a nice change to see things from this medical point of view – the war described in terms of the injuries it dealt out rather than the fighting itself, and from a female rather than a male perspective.

However, the book's style sometimes militates against its own purposes. Direct speech is given without quotation marks or any other markers, so it's hard to know where it ends and where narration begins. Unfortunately this is not exploited for any stylistic effects; it just seems like the sort of wilfully confusing idiosyncrasy some authors adopt in order to seem ‘literary’, and so it annoyed me. More fundamentally I just thought the writing was a bit average. There is a very heavy reliance on dashes, both for parenthesis and to separate clauses, which results in some rather staccato, arrhythmic prose:

The fancier the clobber – went Honora's opinion – the less fighting the bloke had done. They had time only for a few galleries – they told themselves they would be back and would devote a day entirely to the museum. Sally found herself rehearsing – in case she met Charlie Condon soon – the names of artists. She liked David – he was easy to like – and Ingres' woman with the high-waisted gown. When they emerged from the Louvre they found the day still bright with high, streaky clouds and – though it was chilly – they walked in the Tuileries Gardens where trees were still bare.

That sounds like I've just taken random examples and glued them together, but it's an actual paragraph from the book.

The ending is also a bit problematic, taking the French-Lieutenant's-Woman approach of giving you different options for how things might have worked out. Tom, there is one reality where I found this artful and beautiful, but there is another reality where I thought it was a real dereliction of duty. show less

Probably closer to a 2.5, but the writing is excellent.

Better to have renamed the book The Daughters of Morpheus. A bit sleepy overall.

The premise was fascinating to me: nurses, and the front lines, in World War I.

I did not connect with any of the characters: I felt like I was viewing them through a veil; everything was foggy, insubstantial, including the raw pain of the soldiers as they lay dying. One could argue that that was Keneally's intent: to somehow anesthetize the audience: render the reader a somnambulist-voyeur, but I don't think he's that clever. In either case, whether intentional or not, it didn't work.

The dream-like quality of the story was irritating -- one never got a sense of anyone feeling anything. And although I show more haven't been to war, and can't say for certain, I would imagine that there is a lot of rawness, and terror, and panic, and confusion, and really anything but sleepiness.

Worst WWI book I've read. show less

This year marks the centennial of the start of WWI -- a global collapse into brutality as horrific as Mars, the ancient Roman god of war, could have possibly devised. We have often been treated in novels and non-fiction to the male perspective. For Australian soldiers like those in this narrative), their participation has rightly been viewed as heroic. Thomas Keneally has chosen instead to portray this conflict from the view of Australian volunteer nurses, particularly the two Durance sisters, Sally and Naomi. Through them, we are dropped into Gallipoli, Lemnos, the sinking of the Archimedes and the Western Front.

This is a gripping tale which kept me rapt from first to last. The tensions between the sisters, their sense of alienation show more from their home and family, mirror in some respects the tensions between the warring nations. Keneally's choice of dialogue sans quotation marks has distressed some. It wasn't an issue for me -- the pace continued to race along. I found the choice of alternate endings to be more offputting. It does have the fortunate result of giving something for everyone. I intend to search out more books from this author. show less

I picked up this novel from my local bookstore shortly after it was published in September last year, not because of any particular interest in or knowledge about the involvement of nurses in World War I, but because I respect Thomas Keneally as a writer and and hadn't read any of his work for a while. It took me several months to start reading the book and a hour or two of reading it to decide that I was going to like it. For the past two days I haven't wanted to put it down.

Keneally's main characters are sisters Naomi and Sally Durance, nurses from an Australian country town, who are pulled together and pushed apart by a shared family secret. When World War I breaks out, they volunteer to join the Australian Army Nursing Service, show more which was part of the Army's medical corps. The sisters are initially sent to Egypt and later work on a hospital ship and then on an island in the Mediterranean, caring for soldiers injured in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Later, they work in France: Naomi in a hospital run by an English volunteer, Sally in an Australian Army hospital and then in a casualty clearing station close to the front line. Keneally details their experiences from 1914 to 1918 and the experiences of the young men and women whom they meet and with whom they work.

This is not a cheery tale. That's not to say that it doesn't have its lighter moments, but the story is a grim one. There are some distressing scenes describing war injuries, their treatment and their effects. And while the nurses necessarily work behind the front line, they are not immune from the direct consequences of battle. Suffice to say that a number of scenes made me weep. Keneally's prose is powerful and he has a gift for describing momentous scenes in relatively few words. I read a professional review of the novel which highlighted a couple of linguistic anachronisms. While I accept that they are there, I didn't notice them as I read, which confirms how engaged I was with the characters and the story. Readers should know that Keneally does not use quotation marks for dialogue. This does not bother me at all. In fact - in this book at least - I prefer it. The prose looks clean and uncluttered on the page and it was never difficult to work out who's speaking to whom.

As I'm not a World War I expert and have no medical background, I can't assess the accuracy of Keneally's research. However, Keneally is not only a novelist. He has written a number of books on Australian history, a book on Irish history and biographies, including a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Keneally knows how to do research and he has listed his sources at the end. I am prepared to trust that he got the history right.

Several reviews on Goodreads refer to the fact that Keneally presents alternative endings to the novel as a cop-out. Neither of his alternative endings was the ending I wanted. However, I don't agree that the device is a cop-out. What the presentation of alternative endings does is illustrate one of the novels most pervasive themes: the extent to which life is a lottery with an infinite range of possible outcomes. None of us know when we wake up in the morning if the story of our day is going to end happily. How much greater the odds of an unhappy ending for those involved in or directly affected by war: five millimetres difference in the trajectory of a bullet may mean complete safety, losing the tip of an ear, or death. As one of the characters in the novel - a soldier who has incurred horrific injuries - says: "When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they'll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place."

In spite of the grimness of the story, I'm glad that I read this work. It's both a moving piece of literature and a powerful tribute to the nurses of World War I, whose contribution deserves more acknowledgment. 4-1/2 stars. show less