The Heat of the Sun [Kindle Edition]

If you read "A Separate Peace" in high school (like this reviewer) and were disappointed at the ending (the most charismatic character expires in a bizarre manner), this may be the book for you. What would have happened to Phinny when he grew up? Would he and Gene have stayed in touch? Would Gene have managed to corral and come to terms with his jealousy/admiration?

"The Heat of the Sun," is a retelling of "Madame Butterfly," and also the story of a lifelong relationship between two men who meet as schoolmates, one a bookish introvert, the other a flamboyant extravert. When Ben Pinkerton Jr., a.k.a. Trouble meets Woodley Sharpless, he asks, "Who are you? Who are you really?" A good question. For unknown to both, their fathers had a complex relationship, and ultimately, Sharpless will become the chronicler of Trouble's story. When their paths cross again in the Roaring Twenties and Trouble's politician father offers Sharpless a job, he assumes the real purpose is for him to keep an eye on his old schoolmate, but the man's motives are more sinister. When the connection between the young men's fathers, and the root of Trouble's unease with his family is revealed, the lives of the two are further complicated, and their relationship will climax with the development of the atomic bomb and its tragic outcome.

I enjoyed the book, found it beautifully written without being showy, if a tad melodramatic in places (but then it's the re-telling of an opera). From the blurb, I was surprised that it was a first novel, as it avoided many of the usual pitfalls. Recommended.

It was the germ of a good idea. At the end of Puccini's opera MADAMA BUTTERFLY (or the David Belasco play on which it was based), US Naval Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton returns to Nagasaki with his new wife Kate to reclaim the son he had fathered there some years before in his "marriage" to a geisha known as Butterfly. She kills herself just as the cute blonde kid that his mother had named "Trouble" runs to his father's arms. What happens to the boy after that?

Australian author David Rain has the former lieutenant become a US senator, at one time an apparent shoo-in for President, and a major power behind the throne throughout his career. For Kate Pinkerton is more than the elegant lady who appears beautifully tailored at the end of the opera, but the daughter of significant political family who help her shape her husband's career thereafter. And Trouble? Small of stature but charismatically handsome, he is portrayed as the epitome of his nickname, with an unerring nose for trouble, the boldness to cause it, but also the tragic tendency to become his victim. It is a long time before BF Pinkerton II discovers his true parentage, although his dreams are haunted by distant memories of a devoted Asian face.

There is no need to know the opera to enjoy the book, and very little here that opera-lovers will enjoy that others may miss, other than a few arch references to well-known arias. Rain provides an excellent synopsis of the story halfway through as an entr'acte, before he introduces other characters from the opera into his later episodes. But one borrowing is entirely original. As a Nick Carraway to his Gatsby, Rain provides Trouble with a friend of his own age, Woodley Sharpless, the imagined son of the American Consul at Nagasaki who played a role in the opera as Pinkerton's enabler and unheeded advisor. The two sons are seen in a similar relationship in the book, with Sharpless running into Trouble at crisis moments, aiding him to a certain extent but ultimately unable to save him from the consequences of his folly. Meanwhile, Sharpless has developed his own career as a journalist and biographer; this is his book that we are reading.

There are four major time-periods in the novel, structured theatrically as four acts. Sharpless and Trouble meet at Blaze, an exclusive New England prep school. They then run into one another in bohemian Greenwich Village in the twenties, in Nagasaki again in the late thirties (the period of the Second Sino-Japanese War), and finally at Los Alamos just before the Trinity atomic test. The first two acts are largely generic; the school story could almost involve any two boys who do not merge easily with the crowd, though the writing is by no means bad. But as the novel proceeds, it begins to appear that Rain has a larger purpose, to use the theme as a critique of American imperialism and in particular the relationship between the United States and Japan, right through Hiroshima and (yes) Nagasaki. Unfortunately, as Rain's theme grows more serious, his plotting deteriorates, becoming increasingly implausible. By the time Kate Pinkerton had emerged as the Angela Lansbury character in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, I had pretty much had it. Taking an opera for inspiration does not license a descent into foolish melodrama. [2.5 stars]

Anyone who has ever marveled at Puccini's Madame Butterfly - I've seen it several times and never without shedding a tear - is left with one question at the end: what happens to the love child of Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton? He exits the stage in the arms of his birth father and stepmother to a new life in America.

David Rain cleverly mines the life of Ben Pinkerton, the young boy who becomes known as Trouble. His father has gone on to become a senator and he arrives at his private school ready to live up to that name.

The scope of the book is ambitious: from the early 1920s through Los Alamos the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told by his lifelong orphaned and bookish friend, Woodley Sharpless. The structure is equally bold; for example, Act One: A Boy Named Trouble - or what happened at school in the twenties; Act Two: Telmachus, Stay - or days and nights with Aunt Toolie in the Village, and so on. And the prose? Colorful if a bit distancing and operatically melodramatic in places.

One might call it an everyman search for evolving identity as well as an examination of solidly friends who strive but never quite understand the internal anguish inside of each other. In some ways, it calls to mind The Vices by Lawrence Douglas, another book about an intertwining but on some levels unsatisfying friendship.

This is a book I admired more than loved. It does sag at parts -- particularly in the mid-section -- but it does herald the talent of an emerging writer.