Cassie McCullagh

It should explain that he gets separated from his patrol.

I won't go into why because that's a part of the novel that we learn about.

He then is perhaps dying of fever when he's essentially rescued by some Naga women who then take him into the tribe and nurse him back to health.

And I thought all of that was really fascinating and really interesting.

And I would have actually liked a sort of stronger connection to know what was going on with the Naga people and maybe something from their perspective, because he does keep quite aloof.

And this is to do with his own character as well.

He is quite aloof from them, even within their midst.

They, as a people, were fascinating and it would have been really interesting to

to have not had that British kind of remove from them, I thought.

The whole experience is quite an amazing experience.

Also then, which we haven't actually got to, there is sort of interactions as well with the Japanese.

And that's another aspect of the novel that, you know, was so fascinating.

It would have been great to have seen even more of that, I thought.

I was sort of hungry for more.

for more of that.

There are parts of it where kind of the mist of her story kind of descends and at times I was kind of desperate to kind of get through the mist and find out kind of what happened next.

Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, and so, yeah, the farm stuff was sort of like, and I wondered whether it could be a clever decision by the author knowing that she was taking her main readership, which would be a British readership.

into a very different aspect of the war that she needed such a familiar character and then to link it back to a really familiar place being the farm and his relationship with his wife.

But it also made me reflect what an achievement like a book, let's say Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North was, precisely because it brought in that Japanese understanding as well as the Australian understanding about what was going on.