November 29, 1999
A suspenseful blend of wartime adventures and history, Gabriel's highly atmospheric, labyrinthine saga of international politics and lost families features a hardy heroine confronted by the daughter she's long believed dead. Now 48, self-made millionaire Francine Lawrence is a survivor of WWII. In flashbacks to 1941, she is a young Eurasian mother whose English husband, the manager of a Malay tin mine, disappears when the Japanese attack. Francine and her four-year-old daughter, Ruth, are installed in a hotel in Singapore, but their precarious situation is exacerbated by racial discrimination. Besieged by Europeans who want rooms, the hotel manager evicts Francine and her child. Francine has no choice but to accept rescue by a persistent suitor, Major Clive Napier. They wangle passage on a dilapidated junk, hoping to get to Java, but after a harrowing voyage (a bombing and a typhoon), they come ashore in Borneo. There, the couple are forced to leave Ruth, who is too sick to travel, with friendly natives. Eventually, after they have made their way to freedom, Francine hears that Ruth was bayoneted by invading Japanese soldiers. More than two decades later, Sakura Ueda walks into Francine's posh Manhattan office, claiming to be her long-lost daughter. At this point the scope of the novel expands, and the plot line shifts to the internecine policies of Laos in the early '70s, involving drug lords, the CIA, the U.S. government and the Pathet Lao. The author burdens Sakura with an impenetrably tangled, tragic history: a childhood in the Bornean jungle and in Tokyo with a Japanese war criminal who later commits seppuku, an adolescence of isolation and poverty and an adulthood marked by gang rape, run-ins with Laotian gangsters, heroin dealing, the kidnapping of her baby and tuberculosis. The narrative is most effective when Gabriel (House of Many Rooms) focuses on Francine and on her skeptical, defensive and complicated feelings toward Sakura, whom she believes is an impostor out for her "mother"'s millions. Though the heroic, violent climax is unnecessarily complicated, Francine's and Sakura's revelatory emotional meltdown is poignant.