Book Review
Lack of characterization makes it hard to sustain interest in Pearl Harbor novel

By Ann M. Sato
Special to The Advertiser

"RED SUN: A Fictional History" by Richard Ziegler and Patrick M. Patterson. Bess Press, paper, $11.95.

The authors of "Red Sun" had a great idea for a book: What if Japan succeeded in invading Hawai'i after the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

What if the aircraft carriers Lexington and Enterprise had been at Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese thought they would be on Dec. 7, 1941? What if military strategist William ("Bull") Halsey, then a vice admiral, had been killed during the battle? What if a third wave of attackers had been launched, as the Japanese originally had planned? What if the military's primary fuel depot had been destroyed in the attack?

All this could have happened, and does happen, in the first chapter of Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson's "fictional history," released by the Bess Press here just in time for the fuss over Disney's summer blockbuster, "Pearl Harbor."

Moving on to the aftermath, what if the Japanese had played on the racial tensions already present in the Islands, restoring the Hawaiian monarchy and forcing Japanese Americans to choose between collaboration and imprisonment in labor camps? What if so many familiar aspects of the war in Europe came true in Hawai'i: food shortages provoking a thriving black market, resistance fighters risking their life to undermine the enemy, sexual slavery, forced labor and prisoner of war camps?

Again, it all could have happened and, more than mere speculation, this kind of imagining is a respected field of study in the field of historical scholarship because considering what could have happened tends to shed light on what did happen, and to suggest tactics for the future.

One of the best things about the book is a chapter-by-chapter appendix that separates fact from fiction; explaining who actually existed and who did not, which events actually took place and which did not.

Still, this is a novel, meant to be read at least as much for enjoyment as enlightenment. And here is where Ziegler and Patterson, for all their painstaking scholarship, fall short. Stories are told through the minds and hearts of people; otherwise, a book like this is, as that old saw about history says, just one damned thing after another.

This book will be of great interest to readers who enjoy unadorned military history. But for readers whose primary interest is in characterization and the human element, it's difficult to sustain interest in "Red Sun."

Ziegler and Patterson do make use of the members of a single Japanese American family both to tell the history of the plantation mind set in Hawai'i and to serve as eyes through which we see the action of the post-Pearl Harbor years. And there are other speaking parts, as well.

But these people never get up and breathe; they tell instead of do. Rather than writing scenes — key bits of action and dialogue that move the action along and reveal the characters' internal landscapes — the authors intersperse chapters of dry military history with equally dry segments of first-person narrative that boil down to "first I did that, then I did that, then that happened."

The whole book feels rushed, as though there's so much history to tell (O'ahu isn't retaken by American forces until December 1945) that the authors don't have time to spend with the people whose stories ought to be at the heart of the tale.

Had they taken that time, or had that skill, however, this book could have gone beyond a great story idea.

And it would be a natural local best-seller, given that the characters in such a book would be standing in for our own grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles.

Who in Hawai'i might not have gotten caught up in the speculation? What would my Japanese American grandfather, who went to school in Japan, have done if the Japanese had offered him land and status for cooperation? How would my Hawaiian cousins react to restoration of the monarchy, even at the hands of people they had been taught to consider the enemy? What conflicts of conscience, loyalty and family interest might all of us have been caught up in?