Below surface, 'Betrayers' enthralls

THE BETRAYERS by David P. Penhallow; Rice Street Press, paper, $14.95

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

But for some reason, the very outrageousness that had endeared Percy to me in the previous book gave me a headache in the second. So I wisely put the book down and waited to to be ready to laugh again. The moment came last weekend when I pawed through the "guilt shelf" (aka the stack of books to be reviewed that never seems to grow any smaller), finally ready to reacquaint myself with Percy with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Penhallow gets the book off to a bang-up start:

• "I have two secrets," Percy tells us, speaking in the italics that throughout the book indicate we're inside his head.
• "Once I floated on top of a coffin in the middle of the Pacific.
• "The other secret happened to me on the Aquitania."

And a larger-than-life secret it is, involving murder, duplicitous spies, a mysterious widow, stowaways, secret treasure, an ancient curse, men (and children) overboard and a cast of characters of the sort that would result if you turned a 1940s Hollywood movie lot on its head and shook vigorously.

Once again, the plot owes much to Best Foods mayonnaise — Percy's favorite food.

The swashbuckling story focuses on Percy's 1942 voyage aboard the Aquitania, a British-flagged ship full of haole kama'aina women and children fleeing wartime Hawai'i, war wounded being transported to Mainland hospitals and Japanese-American teachers and Buddhist priests on their way to internment camps. Percy is traveling with tomboy sister Marigold and his glamorous, pampered and chain-smoking Auntie Momi. Their mother having died and their father remarried, the two children are being fobbed off on a pair of maiden aunts in Baltimore.

This time, I made note of the clues dropped by Penhallow in the prologue: Percy's own assessment of himself as "an obnoxious, needy, spoiled brat" and his admission that "I kept secrets in a child world of my own making."

It's important to understand that this voyage — during which everyone seems always to be shrieking at each other, falling into childish tantrums or overwrought vapors, disbelieving the obvious and naively swallowing the clearly spurious — is contained largely in Percy's child world, which is made up of bits of his favorite movies.

He is acting a life he can bear because he cannot bear the life he must live — one in which his mother was killed by a strafer during the attack on Pearl Harbor while he was at home spooning Best Foods on his eggs and bacon; the beloved family retainer Hatsuko is dead, too; and his father has married a woman neither he nor his sister can abide.

Percy is, in fact, a child in deepest mourning, who, as he later tells us, purposely places his feeling of loss and his yearning for acceptance in a box in his head and instead lives out his fantasy of being a hero — or at least a chorus line dancer. Few of the adults around him are any help, but he does form some friendships (one of them with the real-life actor Buster Crabbe, a Hawai'i Olympic athlete who played "Flash Gordon" and "Tarzan" in the movies, and who makes a more-than-cameo appearance). He has a faithful, if prickly, sidekick in his sister and a pair of calabash cousins aboard ship.

I ought to have trusted Penhallow more on my first reading, and known that the slapstick buffoonery of much of the book would prove to have an underpinning of reality. Through his adventures, as he tries to lift the family curse and protect a collection of Hawaiian artifacts, Percy, the scamp who can't keep himself from blurting out whatever's in his head and the ringleader in a series of complex plots, is also maturing into Percy, the sadder but wiser young man.

The book is laced with timely lessons that stop short of preaching. In conversations with Buster Crabbe, the ship's captain, his spy friend Mr. Harada and others, Percy ponders the futility of war, the nature of courage, the definition of the truth and the roots of wickedness.

In just a short few weeks, he goes from a boy who's a sucker for a smile to one who trusts less readily. He learns that people aren't what they seem on the outside, but that, while there is true evil in the world, there is good, as well.

Penhallow again displays his enviable ability to conjure in convincing detail not only the world of the 1940s but also the world of a child. Word choice, thought patterns, that odd mixture of wisdom and naivete that children exhibit, all conspire to create a memorable — if often obnoxious — character.