Talking About O'Dwyer

Donovan O'Dwyer, a larger-than-life New Zealander long settled in Oxford, has died. At the funeral and afterwards everyone talks about him, but only his fellow expatriate Mike Newall, a Wittgenstein scholar, knows the whole story, and he tells it to his friend Bertie Winterstoke over pub lunches. In the Second World War, during the Battle of Crete, Joe Panapa, a soldier of the Māori Battalion under O'Dwyer's command, died at Maleme airfield; his family blamed the officer and put a makutu, a curse, on him. Newall's own life is bound up with the Panapas, for Joe's son was his closest childhood friend. Moving between New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s, wartime Crete, America in the Vietnam years and present-day Oxford and Croatia, the novel also follows Newall through a divorce, a lost love and old guilt.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

War, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

United Kingdom, New Zealand, Greece, Croatia

First published

1999

Author's age

67 when first published

ISBN

9780140288391 (Penguin Books, New Zealand)

9781860467103 (Harvill Press, United Kingdom)

9781860468360 (Harvill Press, United Kingdom)