Review
By: Bob Bonomi
By: Ellis Holden (KINNY) Kinyon (AUTHOR),
Thea A Kinyon Boodhoo (EDITOR)
Publisher: Kinyon (JANUARY 3, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0615943543
ISBN-13: 978-0615943541
With all of the books written and movies filmed about World War II, especially the war in the Pacific theater against the Japanese, it has become increasingly difficult to find a fresh perspective on the conflict. Movie producers have often turned to the perennial historical fiction stories of love and romance, silhouetted against the backdrop of the war, in order to draw people in and capture their imaginations.
But in “The Odyssey of a Lady”, E. H. Kinyon (Kinny to his family and friends), has managed to take a rather straightforward diary of the actions and ports of call of an aging Wickes-class destroyer called the USS Talbot and present it in its historical setting by personifying the ship and making her the center of a story of action and adventure.
Personification of non-human animals is fairly commonplace, but outside of android-like creations like those found in Asimov’s “I, Robot”, the personification of inanimate objects often results in clever but single-minded evil creations like Stephen King’s “Christine”. Not so in “Odyssey”. In it, Kinyon manages to give the ship a feminine personality that is a cross between a motherly lady figure to her crew, and a free-spirited lass seeking adventure.
Throughout the telling of the ship’s story, the author never refers to her by name, but instead only by nondescript feminine pronouns. Although the story of the Lady begins with the author setting his eyes on her in 1941, her real life story begins with her commissioning in 1918, near the end of the First World War. The ship is never really part of the earlier conflict, and the author shrouds the years before he meets her in a sort of foggy haze of limited recollection. Instead, he only focuses on the period during which he served on her as her radio operator. From the point where he first boards her until he leaves her in 1945, Kinyon’s story follows her journey much as one would relate the story of one’s infatuation with an unrequited love during a five-year affair.
This is no first-person recollection of thoughts and opinions. Rather, the author portrays the ship, her thoughts, her emotions, as he watches her from afar as if she shares her story with him over coffee or an after-dinner drink. It is a glimpse into the psyche, shared with a close friend, without all the intimate details of a steamy love affair.
While this is a novel approach to portraying the voyages of a naval vessel, the events themselves are limited to actual facts (more or less), which in turn limits the depth of the story. Still, the book is, more than anything, a step-by-step journal of the travels of the USS Talbot, as one is reminded of when one comes across the holes created by missing pages from the manuscript. In that aspect, however, the book is less of a work of fiction than it is one of fact and interpretation: facts based on the timeline of the voyages, interpretations from a crew member on what would be occurring in the mind of the ship had it possessed feelings and human thoughts.
Nevertheless, the story is a love story of sorts; the brief encounter between two souls that, like the passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, reflect the passing of ships in the night that appear in the darkness and speak to one another, only to fade into darkness again: Ship and sailor; forever linked by their shared voyage.
Editor’s note: Yes, the name is the same: Ellis Kinyon is the editor of this journal’s father. He passed away in 1958 in a boating accident, along with his 5 year old son, David. He was survived by his mother, Lela Kinyon,his wife, Esther Kinyon – now Dr. Esther Palmer – and, Dr. Lezlie Kinyon, mother of Thea Kinyon Boodhoo.
Help Transcribe War Diaries for The National Archives: http://www.operationwardiary.org/
Bob Bonomi is a businessman and aspiring writer currently living in Plano, Texas. He was born and raised in a small town in northern Idaho; and after college landed in Dallas, Texas where he worked for a computer services company in technical sales and marketing. Eventually he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he started his own computer consulting company. It was in Tulsa that he re-discovered his love for writing, and joined an online writers’ forum consisting of both successful and aspiring writers representing a variety of writing genres. Bob has written articles for engineering and computer technology technical publications, and his current writing projects consist primarily of spiritual reflections in his role as deacon for the Roman Catholic Church. Bob is married with two mostly-grown children.