UK-based Ann Bennett’s newly-published
Bamboo Road is part of a Second World War trilogy of historical novels set in Southeast Asia. Her
trilogy can be read in any order and includes her earlier titles Bamboo
Heart and Bamboo Island. Here Ann explains what inspired
her to write a trio of linked, standalone stories.
I began researching the Second World War in
South East Asia and the Thai-Burma railway well before I had the idea of
writing a trilogy about it. The stories grew organically out of the research I
did into my father’s wartime experience. He died in 1970 when I was seven, weakened by his three and a half years
as a prisoner of war of the Japanese. I began to get interested in finding out
about what he had suffered when I was in my early twenties. I suppose it
started out as a way of forging some sort of link with him, and also as a way
of understanding why he’d died relatively young.
It wasn’t
until 2010, after many trips to South East Asia, and years of frustrating research,
that through help from the Far East Prisoners of War community, I discovered my
father’s liberation questionnaire and Japanese record card in the UK National
Archives in London. In the questionnaire, he had listed all the camps he had
been in on the Thai-Burma railway, together with specific dates. He had also
written about some of the things that had happened to him and events he had
witnessed. He wrote about an escape attempt by prisoners in one of the camps, and
of surviving the torpedoing of a Japanese transport off the Philippines when
being transported from Singapore to Taiwan in 1944.
The events
he had described formed the basis of a plotline for the story of a fictional
prisoner, Tom Ellis. He became my central character in Bamboo Heart, which incidentally started life called The Pomelo Tree.
At that
stage I only set out to write one book. In researching it I read a great deal
about the Malaya Campaign and the fall of Singapore. I also researched the
plight of prisoners of war and that of the civilian population of Malaya and
Singapore caught up in the occupation. I’d read so many poignant stories of
personal tragedy, brutality and survival that after I’d finished Bamboo Heart I knew I hadn’t finished
writing about the Second World War in South East Asia. I wanted to explore it
further through other characters and from different angles. It was only then
that I decided to write two further books, and realised that their titles could
be linked by the word bamboo.
My trilogy
isn’t about one set of characters whose stories unfold over three books, as for
example in Olivia Manning’s wartime novels forming her two trilogies, the Balkan Trilogy, and the Levant Trilogy. I wouldn’t have been
able to explore different experiences in the same way if I’d tried to do that. Instead
I wrote different stories linked by one momentous historical event, and by the common
themes of war, survival, love, and loss. I was inspired by the fact that each
of the books in Sebastian Faulks’ French
Trilogy, was a standalone story about war-torn France. Bamboo Heart was already a complete story in itself, but I worked
some the events in that book into the two other books in order to link them
further. I also gave one or two of the characters from Bamboo Heart cameo parts in the later books.
The main
inspiration for Bamboo Island was the
sinking of the civilian ship, the Vyner
Brooke, off Banka Island in Indonesia, and the moving story of Vivian
Bullwinkel, the only survivor of a group of Australian nurses who were
massacred on the beach by Japanese soldiers. That formed the starting point for
my story about a British rubber planter’s wife, caught up in the Fall of
Singapore. Real life Bangka Island off Sumatra became my fictional Bamboo
Island.
The idea for Bamboo Road took root when I read about the Thai Underground
movement, the V Organisation, local people who took great personal risks to
help allied prisoners of war. In particular, Boon Pong, a Kanchanaburi
vegetable merchant who had contracts to supply prison camps and who smuggled
medicines and radio parts into the camps under the noses of the Japanese guards.
The
trouble is, now I’ve finished my trilogy, I still want to write more about
Wartime South East Asia! I have
already written thirty thousand words of a new story, with the working title Burma Star. It’s again about the Death
Railway, but this time set at the other end of the line in Thanbyuzayat in
Burma. According to Wikipedia, so-called trilogies growing beyond three books is quite a
common phenomenon. For example, the Hitchhikers
Guide to the Galaxy started out as a trilogy, but Douglas Adams carried on
writing more books. He apparently referred to Mostly Harmless as “the fifth book in the increasingly
inaccurately named trilogy.”
Details: The Bamboo Trilogy is published in paperback by Monsoon Books, priced in local currencies.
