“If I were to write a book, I would call it The Disasters of War and Love. Because, in my life, the two, war and love, are so entwined, it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
So says Marcel, the main character of Kyo Maclear’s touchingly beautiful second novel, Stray Love. Kyo Maclear’s debut, The Letter Opener (2007) was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artists Award and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
In Stray Love, soon-to-be fifty-year-old Marcel receives a phone call from his old love, Kiyomi. Kiyomi’s mother has been in an accident and she wants to fly her eleven-year-old daughter, Iris, to London to stay with Marcel while she rushes to her mother’s side. Iris, quirky, lovely, and smart the way an only-child-of- a-single-mother can be, arrives in Marcel’s life just at the exact moment of need; Marcel’s mother has recently died. Iris (and Marcel’s mother’s death) opens up Marcel’s floodgates of memory and the reader is thrust into his young life, from the ages of eight to eleven.
We are taken on a journey with Marcel as he comes to terms with his unconventional upbringing, his feeling of never-belonging (he’s mixed race), his missing mother, his war-correspondent adopted father, the years he spends in London living with artists, and the years he spends in the suburbs outside of London. We are also with him, in Book Two, in the months he spends in Vietnam during the beginning of the Vietnam War. Eleven years old, living in the Continental Hotel in Saigon with other foreign correspondents, Marcel, an artistically gifted child, wanders the streets taking everything in.
Living with Oliver, his adopted father, Marcel comes to understand things about war and adults. “Looking back I can see it. It wasn’t that the adults closest to me were unreliable. They were devastated. And I, a boy raised in their midst, soaked up their sense of mortality and mistrust like a damp sponge.” The 1960s, being of mixed race, it’s a complicated childhood for Marcel. Oliver is unstable, as is Marcel’s London guardian, Pippa. Both love Marcel but toss him back and forth between them as they suffer with their emotional and financial instability.
Kyo Maclear is a strong and natural writer. Her descriptions are poetic but practical. We know exactly what she means when she says it. Marcel meets another mixed race child at his suburban school and Maclear describes him this way: “He grinned the minute he saw me and hopped around as if our friendship were a scorching, unexpected blaze of sunshine. His hands would paddle with excitement as he told me this or that story and he would laugh his scarily loud laugh while I doled out meagre lines about living in London. He hardly seemed to notice that I was playing it cool.”
She shines a light on the bullying in Marcel’s life by writing,
We were pelted with chestnuts on street corners. I suppose a boy can get used to almost anything, but I know I still carry a residue. It’s like an ache that arises in damp weather, a hurting along my spine. From that period of my life comes the habit of circumspection, of avoiding homogenous groups, of being better than most at reading body language, of deducing exits.
Marcel’s sense of not belonging, his unease with who he is, is summed up by Kiyomi:
Kiyomi had taught me the word. Moggy, she said, was a slang word for “cat,” but it was also a name for mongrels. “I am a moggy,” she said, “because dad is Scottish and mum is Japanese.” According to Kiyomi, moggies were half-ghost. Moggies cannot walk down the street or into a room or watch a movie without looking for themselves.
When will I appear? was the question on the lips of most moggies.
When Iris comes into Marcel’s life she badgers him to explain things, to look at the world through a child’s eyes. Her openness and innocence leave Marcel bemused and terrified – he wants her to remain young and he compares her pureness of thought to his life as a child affected by war and racism. He says, “I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.”
The mystery in this novel is in where Marcel’s mother was as he grew up, a mystery that twists quickly and satisfyingly at the end. Maclear’s structure is perfect. She loops memory, story, present and past, having them come together quickly and wonderfully at the end.
What is this novel about? Kyo Maclear says it’s “about a lonely boy yearning to belong.” Yes, that’s true. But it is also about love and war and art and careful, controlled, beautiful writing.
‘Stray Love’ by Kyo Maclear
Book Reviews
“If I were to write a book, I would call it The Disasters of War and Love. Because, in my life, the two, war and love, are so entwined, it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
So says Marcel, the main character of Kyo Maclear’s touchingly beautiful second novel, Stray Love. Kyo Maclear’s debut, The Letter Opener (2007) was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artists Award and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
In Stray Love, soon-to-be fifty-year-old Marcel receives a phone call from his old love, Kiyomi. Kiyomi’s mother has been in an accident and she wants to fly her eleven-year-old daughter, Iris, to London to stay with Marcel while she rushes to her mother’s side. Iris, quirky, lovely, and smart the way an only-child-of- a-single-mother can be, arrives in Marcel’s life just at the exact moment of need; Marcel’s mother has recently died. Iris (and Marcel’s mother’s death) opens up Marcel’s floodgates of memory and the reader is thrust into his young life, from the ages of eight to eleven.
We are taken on a journey with Marcel as he comes to terms with his unconventional upbringing, his feeling of never-belonging (he’s mixed race), his missing mother, his war-correspondent adopted father, the years he spends in London living with artists, and the years he spends in the suburbs outside of London. We are also with him, in Book Two, in the months he spends in Vietnam during the beginning of the Vietnam War. Eleven years old, living in the Continental Hotel in Saigon with other foreign correspondents, Marcel, an artistically gifted child, wanders the streets taking everything in.
Living with Oliver, his adopted father, Marcel comes to understand things about war and adults. “Looking back I can see it. It wasn’t that the adults closest to me were unreliable. They were devastated. And I, a boy raised in their midst, soaked up their sense of mortality and mistrust like a damp sponge.” The 1960s, being of mixed race, it’s a complicated childhood for Marcel. Oliver is unstable, as is Marcel’s London guardian, Pippa. Both love Marcel but toss him back and forth between them as they suffer with their emotional and financial instability.
Kyo Maclear is a strong and natural writer. Her descriptions are poetic but practical. We know exactly what she means when she says it. Marcel meets another mixed race child at his suburban school and Maclear describes him this way: “He grinned the minute he saw me and hopped around as if our friendship were a scorching, unexpected blaze of sunshine. His hands would paddle with excitement as he told me this or that story and he would laugh his scarily loud laugh while I doled out meagre lines about living in London. He hardly seemed to notice that I was playing it cool.”
She shines a light on the bullying in Marcel’s life by writing,
We were pelted with chestnuts on street corners. I suppose a boy can get used to almost anything, but I know I still carry a residue. It’s like an ache that arises in damp weather, a hurting along my spine. From that period of my life comes the habit of circumspection, of avoiding homogenous groups, of being better than most at reading body language, of deducing exits.
Marcel’s sense of not belonging, his unease with who he is, is summed up by Kiyomi:
Kiyomi had taught me the word. Moggy, she said, was a slang word for “cat,” but it was also a name for mongrels. “I am a moggy,” she said, “because dad is Scottish and mum is Japanese.” According to Kiyomi, moggies were half-ghost. Moggies cannot walk down the street or into a room or watch a movie without looking for themselves.
When will I appear? was the question on the lips of most moggies.
When Iris comes into Marcel’s life she badgers him to explain things, to look at the world through a child’s eyes. Her openness and innocence leave Marcel bemused and terrified – he wants her to remain young and he compares her pureness of thought to his life as a child affected by war and racism. He says, “I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.”
The mystery in this novel is in where Marcel’s mother was as he grew up, a mystery that twists quickly and satisfyingly at the end. Maclear’s structure is perfect. She loops memory, story, present and past, having them come together quickly and wonderfully at the end.
What is this novel about? Kyo Maclear says it’s “about a lonely boy yearning to belong.” Yes, that’s true. But it is also about love and war and art and careful, controlled, beautiful writing.
HarperCollins | 320 pages | $29.99 | cloth | ISBN #978-1443408592