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A little known corner of the Second World War is a place perpetually at the edge of death in The Wind Is Not a River

Of the mountain of novels written about the Second World War, I can recall only one that deals with the campaign in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Gore Vidal’s first novel, written when he was 19 years old and published in 1946, was entitled Williwaw, after the violent storms that come sweeping down the Arctic to batter the Aleutians. In Vidal’s novel, the williwaw is only the most dramatic and dangerous of local malignancies — the islands at the best of times are barren, lonely, cold and wet.

Now Canadian novelist Brian Payton confirms this view of the scenery in The

Wind Is Not a River, a new tale of the Aleutian campaign.

From Payton and Vidal’s account it is easy to see why this theatre of war — the only battle fought on American soil during the Second World War — has remained obscure. The Japanese began the affair by occupying two of the westernmost islands, Attu and Kiska, for no intelligible reason. Strategically those pieces of real estate led nowhere. Then the Americans matched Japanese idiocy by following suit and rushing ships and planes to their end of the island chain.

In Payton’s eyes, and the eyes of history, this commenced a campaign of sheer misery — thousands of men stuck in a wilderness of wind and rain, no women, no diversions, no creature comforts. It was small wonder that the U.S. government was not anxious to publicize this front. Perhaps out of fear the populace would panic, conjuring visions of Japanese invaders sweeping down from the north, army censorship became tight and

news coverage of the theatre almost non-existent.

In Payton’s novel, a freelance journalist, John Easley, is determined to rectify this state of affairs and bring home news of the unpleasantness. His motives for abandoning his wife, Helen, back in Seattle — their marriage has been close to blissful at the start — and putting his life in danger are not clear. Certainly he is concerned for the fate of the servicemen being wilfully removed from sight, their sacrifices ignored. “He feels he has a duty to get the story,” Helen says to a friend. But Easley apparently also feels guilt over the death of his younger brother, an enlisted man lost in action over the English Channel. Bringing succour to the GIs in Alaska, and risking his life at the same time, will help expiate that guilt.

The opening scene of the novel — Easley waking to his surroundings in Attu after crash landing in a bomber — immediately places the reader in the heart of the action. There is no sign of the plane or its other occupants, except for a young soldier from Texas named Karl Bitburg. The two, for all they know, are utterly alone to face the fog, the cold, the snow — it’s April and still winter in the Aleutians. So inhospitable is the terrain that not a single tree stands on the islands. “It’s as if,” Payton writes, “no living thing above waist height stands a chance against the wind.”

They soon discover they are not in fact alone. The Japanese have established a camp on the island. Easley and Bitburg must therefore not only dodge the enemy in this land with no cover, but forage for food in this land without fields and

fellow mammals, and stay warm and dry in this land of perpetual rains and mist. The latter imperative may be most urgent. As infantrymen discovered in the two world wars, the lack of dry socks, in particular, posed a greater hazard to life and health than enemy artillery. Easley, unable to keep his feet warm, muses near the end of his ordeal, “Of all the ways he imagined death overtaking him — starvation, cold, poisoning, a fall — he never dreamed it would crawl up from his toes.”

Such are the outlines of the novel’s basic conflict, and a powerful conflict it is. Payton keeps his prose taut so that nothing diverts the reader from the suspense of Easley and his compatriot’s struggle to stay alive. You can hardly ask for a more gripping novelistic scenario. The Aleutian landscape itself functions as the novel’s vital principle, a presence all the more haunting for its indifference to human life. A number of times Easley and Bitburg are com-

pared to wandering spirits. “Part of me feels like a ghost,” Bitburg complains at one point, “Like we’re already haunting this place and we don’t even know we’re dead.”

Later, Easley also feels he has become a ghost — or, if not a ghost, something equally desperate. Easley and Bitburg try to hail an American flying boat overhead, and Easley thinks, “Had anybody been able to see them, they would surely appear as madmen banished to the ends of the earth.” Like madmen, Easley begins to lose a sense of the present, to be replaced by a dwelling on the past. “Hiding in the dark and the cold at the edge of the world, are memories all that are left to him?” Easley ponders.

Helen, meanwhile, is not idle. Driven to distraction by absence of any word from her husband, she joins a USO troupe slated to entertain troops in Alaska. It’s a desperate gambit to find out information and almost certainly doomed to failure. It’s also highly improbable given that Helen has no show business experience, but apparently the spirit of Judy Garland helps carry the day, and Helen’s attempt to help mount a show parallels the far grimmer attempt of her husband to find edible mussels.

Again, the author keeps his narrative momentum at a pace sufficient to prevent the reader from raising awkward questions. As it is, Helen’s quest forms almost a sub-plot to the main action, and a good subplot never does a novel harm.

Payton finds room in this dual narrative to entertain religious themes, such as the efficacy of prayer. Helen is a Catholic and says her Hail Marys, while Easley is more

doubtful. He is saved during his island ordeal, it seems, by the spiritual equivalent of a Marian apparition. I suspect this has less to do with anything conventionally religious, than it has to do with the influence of Jung — or perhaps Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye or Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business.

Helen and Easley both have problems with their identity, not unconnected — surprise! — to their respective genders. Part of Easley’s guilt, it seems, is his jealousy over his younger brother’s ease and charm and way with women. Helen, deprived of a mother early in life, and absent any sisters, feels the lack of a natural womanliness, feels outside “the secret intrigues of women,” in Payton’s words.

She seems feminine enough to this reader, but apparently one of the functions of the USO narrative is to show her bonding for the first time with other women, in a kind of female version of the male buddy action movie. Bitburg and Easley also grow closer after Bitburg reveals some awful secrets of his family life. It’s what Payton calls “the liberation of confession,” and he extends it to Helen in a scene where she finally comes clean with her fellow USO troopers and emerges all the better for it.

This is an acceptable thematic development, but it does bring us back to the improbability problem. Payton never completely solves it. Fortunately, the narration as a whole doesn’t buckle under the strain. The interest of the reader never flags, even to the last page. The ghost of Gore Vidal, roaming once more the edge of the world, is pleased.