The search for the diary’s answers very much mirrors the one for her own family’s past. We learn that she had become obsessed in trying to decode a diary kept by William Sullivan, a Canadian POW captured by the Japanese during World War II. When Certainty opens, Gail Lim is dead being mourned by her parents and by her longtime partner, Ansel. “Sometimes, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead,“ he tries telling himself, “Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned.” Yet his daily life is punctuated with vivid flashes of memory from a war that left a lasting impression on his youth. Matthew finds however, that the past has a powerful grip on him. It is in this strange country that is nothing like his tropical birthplace, that he makes a new life for himself and his wife, Clara. The trauma of the loss is so severe that Matthew leaves his childhood love, Ani, behind and makes a life for himself in Canada. The radio writer will discover that her Indonesian grandfather was brutally murdered by the Japanese during World War II and worse, that her own father, Matthew, was witness to this execution. “Ani - hers was a name my parents both knew,“ she recounts in Madeleine Thien’s accomplished debut novel Certainty, “and between them, it seemed to have a meaning, a weight.”Īs it turns out, Lim’s mission to uncover this family secret will trace a history that visits many continents and will eventually yield a very tentative closure for all involved. All her life, Gail Lim has lived with a secret, one that has colored her past and weighed her down like a stone.
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