A tense thriller that draws on its author’s experience in the Balkans war

THRILLER
Two Islands
Ian Kemish
University of Queensland Press, $34.99

Ian Kemish knows of what he writes. The former Australian diplomat was based in Europe during the 1990s at the time of the Balkans war. He has also been an ambassador and high commissioner, and played a pivotal part in Australia’s response to the Bali bombings in 2002. He is now an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland and occasional columnist on world affairs.

His first book, the non-fiction The Consul, detailed the world of diplomacy. Two Islands is his first venture into fiction. And while the characters are invented, their stories are based on the events of the time, which Kemish knows intimately. This gives it a deep vein of authenticity from which to mine.

Two Islands centres on the character of Niko, who because of his young age was allowed to flee a massacre, but in having seen mass murder became a witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. His testimony is vital to bring about justice. One of those responsible for enabling this to happen is Anita, an Australian investigator for the tribunal. The trouble is that Niko takes flight to a remote Scottish island after being spooked that his life is in danger on the orders of those he could implicate of war crimes.

There, he falls into the orbit of the islanders, including another outcast, Fergus, a man tortured by his past in the military in Northern Ireland and in the Balkans. Both carry the weight of their ordeals while trying to find a path to the future. Kemish tells the novel through the eyes of the characters Niko, Anita, Fergus and Ronnie, a World War II island veteran, and the chapters carry their names. Kemish’s interweaving of the political and the personal is seamless, and his depiction of the ’90s is evocative – and timely in reminding the world that for every eruption of war and mass death, cruelty and dislocation of people, there may be peace, but globally only for so long.

Where the waters are becalmed in one place, mountainous seas are raging elsewhere. As Kemish shows, sometimes survival comes down to dumb luck, as in the case of Niko. But having escaped death, he then has to keep running to escape the aftershocks, and as the author shows with Niko and Fergus, the waves are often inside your own mind as much as outside.

By setting their place of refuge as a Scottish island, not quite in the middle of nowhere, but close, Kemish sets up the contrast between the tranquillity, indeed otherworldliness, of the life the islanders experience and the cacophony of opposing voices and the clash of actions off the island. It is indeed a closed world that is prised open through the coming of Fergus and Niko, and the world that follows them there.

If this then is the strength of Two Islands, it falls away in its rounding out of the characters; enough is given to justify their thoughts and actions, but not quite enough to shake the shadow of their being merely cyphers to the book’s premise.

Rather than broad brushstrokes, particularly in the portrayal of Anita, it would have been more enriching to have gone deeper into the character and lose some of the investigative procedural material. A bit of editing of descriptive cliches wouldn’t have gone astray either.

Still, there is a heartbeat to Two Islands that is strong and true. It pulses with a quiet empathy, and rage, for the victims of war. It shows, to quote John Donne, that no man is an island.

Warwick McFadyen’s latest volume of poetry, A Slant of the Light, is available now.

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