taylor-mayed's Full Review: David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars
“Snow Falling on Cedars” is, it has to be said, a mightily impressive work. When you look at all the elements it contains, you cannot help but be impressed by the way in which Guterson has skilfully weaved all the elements of his powerful plot together. First there is the consideration of time – it novel has chapters that take place as early as 1938 and as late as 1955, encompassing all that comes in between and sometimes even describing earlier events as well.
It is also crammed full of themes – racism, war, love, change, age, imprisonment, truth, justice – all of these and dozens more besides, plus enough ambiguity for the reader to be able to bring their own subtext to it. To add to all of this, Guterson has managed to assemble a stunning ensemble cast of characters, each with their own history, viewpoint and interest in proceedings, so much so that there is an argument for saying the book does not contain one definitive central character.
The plot centres around the trial of a Japanese American fisherman, Kabuo Miyamoto, on the American Pacific island of San Piedro in 1954. He is accused of murdering a fellow fishermen, Carl Heine, a man of German descent. This ethnic origin is very deliberate on Guterson’s part, as it sharply contrasts how Kabuo is treated because of his Japanese origin just a decade after the end of the second world war, whereas Carl is a same-generation descendant from the other axis power and yet experiences no racism because of it.
To say that “Snow Falling on Cedars” is just a murder mystery, however, would be like saying “Citizen Kane” is a film about editing a newspaper. The murder it just the framework upon which Guterson hangs a whole host of themes and ideas, skilfully interweaving them so that everything fits so neatly and seamlessly together and nothing ever seems out of place.
Being set so soon after the war, a large part of the novel is indeed about how the war affected those who fought in it, those who were left back at home and the innocent lives that were thrown into turmoil and changed forever. In this vein, you could argue that the novel is essentially about how people’s lives are controlled and directed by forces over which we have little or no control – human beings are victims of circumstances, their lives hanging constantly by a delicate string of coincidences.
Love is another factor that figures strongly in the novel, and sometimes it is shown as being the disruptive force that pulls at those strings of coincidences. Love in the wrong place, at the wrong time or for the wrong person is one of the curses of the human condition, and the emotion is portrayed at both its most beautiful and most frustrating extremes in this novel.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things about the book is the fact that there are no characters who could really be labelled as the ‘bad guy’. Certainly Carl’s mother Etta Heine is an almost totally unsympathetic character, but she is not one of the major figures of the novel and amongst those main characters, each have their good and bad points.
For me personally however, by far the most interesting character of the book is Ishmael Chambers. It seems to me, purely personally speaking, that Ishmael is overwhelmingly the major ‘victim’ character of the book. True, poor old Carl Heine is dead and Kabuo Miyamoto has been wrongly accused of his murder, but both of these men are victims of circumstance. Ishmael is, if anything, a victim of himself.
The very first time that we come across Ishmael, in the opening chapter of the novel, one of the first things that we learn about him is that he is a victim of the war: “He had only one arm, the left having been amputated ten inches below the shoulder joint, so that he wore the sleeve of his coat pinned up with the cuff fastened to the elbow.” We also learn that he is the local reporter: both of these facts will play very important roles later in the book.
In the same introductory chapter, we also discover that there is some past history between Ishmael and Hatsue Miyamoto, the wife of the accused man. After he tries to approach her at the beginning of the trial and she rebuffs him, she looks at him, and he is left “uncertain afterward what her eyes had meant – punishment, sorrow, pain.”
Exactly what this past between the two of them is we discover later on in the novel in chapter eight, when he learn of their childhood and adolescence together. It is at this point that we discover Ishmael to be a victim of perhaps the greatest tragedy that life taunts us with; unrequited love. That horrible feeling of being totally, utterly, hopelessly besotted with somebody who does not and cannot ever love you back. We are made privy to all of Ishmael’s feeling on the matter: “When he sat close to her, as he did now in the water, he felt driven and nervous.” and “Ishmael’s heart began the fretful pounding he’d experienced of late in her presence. There were no words for what he had to say and his tongue felt paralysed. He couldn’t stand another moment without explaining his heart to her. A knot of pressure was building up inside him to declare the love he felt.” These are feelings that will instantly be recognised and identified with by anybody who has ever had the grave misfortune to fall in love.
Of course, the inevitable outcome of unrequited love is pain and rejection, and this is something Ishmael has to go through when he discovers that Hatsue cannot ever love him or be with him. However, he never falls out of love with her, even after she marries another man, and this continued obsession very nearly leads to Ishmael becoming the villain of the novel.
After he has discovered clinching proof of Kabuo’s innocence, Ishmael decides not to go straight to judge Fielding with the news but to tell nobody. His indecision is caused by the fact that he knows if Kabuo is executed for the murder, Hatsue will be left a widow and he can make a play for her again. This temptation is compounded by the fact that Hatsue asks him to write an editorial for his newspaper in support of Kabuo, and you really do think for a time that he is going to, quote “write the article she wanted him to write, in order to make her beholden to him, and then in the trial’s aftermath he would speak with her as one who had taken her side an she would have no choice but to listen.”
But just as it seems he is going to do this appalling thing, he comes back from the edge of darkness and does the decent thing instead, presents his evidence to Hatsue and helps to get the case against Kabuo thrown out, so that Hatsue and her husband can live happily ever after. Certainly not what Ishmael wanted, but what should rightly have happened.
Another thing about Ishmael that makes him seem so much the victim is his war experiences, although these are by no means unique to him as they are something that are shared by all of the major characters in the book. However, whereas characters such as Kabuo and Carl bare purely mental scars from the war, Ishmael suffered both emotionally and physically.
In chapter 16, when Ishmael is trying to write a letter to Hatsue on the eve of his first major battle of the war, his feelings have been turned so upside-down by the conflict that he now feels the complete opposite of his former feelings for Hatsue. “He hated her with everything in his heart, he wrote, and it felt good to him to write it in just that way.” This just goes to show that perhaps love and hate are just two sides of the same coin.
The mental damage done to Ishmael carries on long after the war has finished, as a quote about him on page 30 sums up: “it seemed to him that after the war the world was thoroughly altered.” He no longer sees people or things in the same way, he has a cynical and fatalistic view of the world: “people appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.” This inability to see the beauty and goodness of the world any longer is not something to be reviled but pitied, as it isn’t something Ishmael himself wants to have as a personality trait: “the strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t find a way to do it.” Another tragedy of his life.
The physical scar of his war years is the loss of an arm, and while it never hugely overbears his character in the novel and is indeed only occasionally referred to; it seems to contribute to this bitter personality he has developed since its loss. “He was keenly aware of his pinned-up sleeve, and troubled because it troubled other people. Since they could not forget about it, neither could he.”
One further aspect that makes Ishmael such a tragic character is the fact that he seems to be forever living in the shadow of his father, the great island man and newspaper editor whom everybody seems to have had so much respect for. When Hatsue asks Ishmael to write in support of Kabuo in the newspaper, she refers to it as “your father’s newspaper.” In the courtroom earlier on in the novel, Ed Soames the bailiff thinks to himself that Ishmael s “ ‘bout half the man his father was”, and various other references throughout the book show Ishmael to be playing the role of his father, and doing it poorly, rather than living his own life.
To sum up then, Ishmael is to my mind the central tragic figure of the book simply because he is doomed to be forever unhappy. Carl Heine is dead and out of it, Hatsue and Kabuo are back together, all’s well that ends well apart from for poor old Ishmael who only really wants one thing in life but lost his chance to have it because, in the end, he was too honest.
Yes, he is an angry, bitter and cynical human being, but there are good reasons for this. Even near the end of the book, we see that he is still desperate to be at least a small part of Hatsue’s life even though he knows she is far distant from him now – “When you’re old and thinking back on things, I hope you’ll remember me just a little,” he says to Hatsue, another wish that all of the poor wretched souls who’ve fallen victim to unrequited love will readily identity with. Ishmael is so obsessed with Hatsue and caught up in his own bitterness against the world that he hasn’t really been living, simply existing. Hatsue spots this, and tells him to simply “live”, rather than keep looking back in anger.
As somebody far more eloquent than I once said, many people go through their lives looking back at the people and things that could have been theirs. This seems to me to be a very appropriate summary of the character of Ishmael Chambers, who is in my opinion the very heart and soul of Snow Falling on Cedars. In many ways, it’s his book. But that’s just my own viewpoint of a book which will mean so many different things to so many different people.
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner AwardAmerican Booksellers Association Book of the Year AwardSan Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated...More at HotBookSale
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