GLORIOUS BOY

A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict.

On March 13, 1942, the Durants—Claire, an aspiring anthropologist, and Shep, a British civil surgeon—rush to prepare their exit from Port Blair, a British penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, now under threat from Japanese forces. Claire and Shep pack up her field journals, arrowheads, and shell bowls collected from the native Biya and his medically useful plant specimens from their expeditions into the forest over the past five years. But the one thing they can’t locate is their 4-year-old son, Ty. Mute since birth, Ty’s strongest bond is with his Indian caretaker, Naila, a 13-year-old girl who understands his silent capriciousness better than his own mother. Shep, desperate to get his wife to stay on the ship to Calcutta and safety, drugs her and stays behind on the island to look for their son. He finds Ty almost immediately—he and Naila were napping in a banyan grove—but the family’s separation decisively changes the course of each of its members’ lives. As one of the few remaining British officials on the island, Shep is locked up by Japanese troops, but not before he sends Ty off into the forest with Naila and Leyo, a Biya family friend, to hide with the tribe. Claire, meanwhile, joins the war effort as a codebreaker, devising a code based on the Biya language for a mission that might just allow her to reunite her family. The plot is rollicking in précis but much less gripping in execution, bogged down by an unmanageable amount of detail, the result of Liu’s (editor: Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives, 2011, etc.) obviously meticulous research: “Claire gets to work making her final tests of the TBX-8 transceiver pack, which will be her primary responsibility, and the SCR-536 mobile Handie-talkie that Ward will use for voice communication back to the TBX.” At every turn, it seems, there’s another islander or British government employee whose backstory is meant to lend emotional heft to the novel. The result is a book that feels scattershot—even the most theoretically wrenching moments don’t quite land, and the reader comes away oddly unmoved by the entire cast.

The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn’t quite add up to a well-told story.