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Lark & Termite by Jane Anne Phillips By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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Bestselling author Jane Anne Phillips has won acclaim for her period pieces that focus on real events of the mid-twentieth century and their consequences relayed through her characters. Her most recent novel was released in paperback this month. Lark & Termite (Vintage, 2010) interweaves political themes of the injustices of war with their tragic effects on both sides.
Corporal Robert Leavitt is deployed to Korea in 1950 before hostilities with North Korea begin. He left behind his pregnant bride in Kentucky who anxiously awaits his return. As Leavitt carries out his duties, thoughts of his wife and their child fill his mind. He wants nothing more than to be back with them and continue their lives together, living out all that they’ve dreamed for their future together.
Lark is seventeen and lives with her aunt and brother in a small riverside town in West Virginia. She is straddling a thin line between childhood and adulthood, on the cusp of crossing it and becoming an independent woman. Her aunt, Nonie, wants her niece to have a future, better than what her mother and Nonie made of themselves but Lark doesn’t want to be separated from her brother. She knows her future is tied with him. They share thoughts, feelings and a mother who neither knows and the unanswered questions about her tie them even closer together.
Nonie has spent the past seventeen years covering up for her sister and raising her kids. She works hard for the man she loves but refuses to marry him until his over bearing mother dies. Nonie has always been independent and can make any situation she’s faced with work.
Termite speaks a language all his own and only those closest to him can understand him. He lives in his thoughts and scattered memories, enveloped by Lark and Nonie’s love. He’s content and Lark knows how to care for him. The threat of Social Services lurks as a menacing shadow over the house, threatening to take Termite away to where strangers think he’ll be properly cared for.
A storm approaches these four characters, about to unleash a powerful torrent of destruction and not all will survive. Forces beyond their control will rain down and turn their worlds upside down.
Phillips’ book is based on a real-life event that occurred at the beginning of the Korean War. It was a massacre of South Korean villagers by an American military unit that wasn’t exposed until 1999 by AP journalists. The journalists’ story sparked controversy and later some of their sources and information were discredited. The story is still being debated but Phillips sides with the AP journalists in her portrayal of events. She creates fictional characters that experienced the attack and how the results of it affected people there and back in America.
The book’s strength is Phillips’ well-drawn characters and the empathy she invokes from the injustices they face. The story loses quality with the crass way Phillips depicts intimate relationships and her use of clichéd political and social themes that have worn out their use.
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