A review by archytas
My Beautiful Enemy by Cory Taylor

4.0

This may have suffered from being read back-to-back with Flanagan's opus about the Burma railway, Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan's book is a work of great and delicate complexity, whereas Taylor's piece, also dealing with theme of wartime prisoners, and Japanese-Australian relations, is a relatively simple tale of one man's inability to realise his own sexuality, and the way that eventually costs him a full life. The tale is almost languid in pace, giving the novel a dreamlike feel that suits the setting. I found it difficult to like the protagonist for much of the novel, his helplessness in the face of homophobia and the self-absorbtion of the late teens were drawn well, sometimes painfully.
The Japanese, seen through the eyes of a protagonist wrapped in his own world, are fuzzy, shadowy figures, objects of fear and pity, with the exception of Stanley, the object of our protagonists passion, who emerges like a golden statue, gleaming and perfectly opaque.
The tale works at what it does, I just couldn't help wishing it did a little more.