“There doesn’t have to be a right side and a wrong side. Both sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong. I think both countries are in the wrong this time.”
Some war novels take a stance against the idea of war in the abstract to the extent of implicating all war as equally wrong on all sides. This novel does seem to be staking an anti-war stance at times, but the author has created a rich enough set of contradictions that it is impossible to stake the claim that fighting the war is inherently bad. Australia is under attack by an unidentified foe. The only thing known for sure is that this foe suffers economically in the face of an Australia that could relieve the anguish of those who call the opposing side home but chooses not to. This is the part of the situation which Robyn is speaking of when she identifies both countries as “wrong.” That both sides in a war share a guilt of being “wrong” should make it an easier task of selling an anti-war message. While both sides have sinned, however, only one is the invader. That single issue forever complicates taking an easy path to projecting an anti-war stance. This complexity of the issues keeps the writer from indulging in abstraction and disallow the novel from being fully categorized as anti-war propaganda.
“Don’t feel so bad. This is war now, and normal rules don’t apply. These people have invaded our land, locked up our families. They caused your dogs to die, Ellie, and they tried to kill you three.”
The narrator, Ellie, has confronted her guilt in a section before this in which she admits to having just killed three people. Homer attempts to soothe her guilt by relying upon the oldest justification for inhumanity in the books. The idea that war alters all the rules of morality applicable during peacetime is ludicrous, of course, because it is precisely that kind of thinking which leads to war crimes and atrocities, not to mention the simple act of equating the killing of people with that of killing dogs. For the time being, the characters at the center of the novel are reacting against an assault upon them which means saving their lives and Homer’s advice is entirely applicable. But Homer’s philosophy is exactly same by which soldiers who start out simply protecting their lives wind up committing offenses against moral decency at My Lai and Abu Ghraib.
“It was very sneaky of them. I’m sure if we hadn’t given them the opportunity they would have come up with some lie to get away on their own. It made me feel jealous though, and I wished I could cancel our paddle so I could stay back and chaperone. Deep down in my heart I really didn’t want Homer and Fi to be together.”
The world may have turned upside down and they may have suddenly had to transform into guerilla soldiers, but the main characters in this drama are still teenage boys and girls thrown together without adult supervision. The resulting unleashing of hormones adds yet another level of complexity to their survival story as they find themselves also dealing with surviving the changing emotions stimulated by seeing others behaving differently under these new circumstances. Homer has formerly been cast aside as something of a loser at school by girls, but his sudden change of character into a leader has made him the object of desire. Ellie’s relationship with Homer has always been like that between a brother and sister but watching other him become the attention of another girl brought jealousy to the surface that she may or may not be confusing with emotions of her own that a bit more than sisterly. The subtext here is that this is not a situation relegated to teenagers.
