| A TOWN LIKE ALICE Nevil Shute New York: Ballantine, January 1982 (© 1957 Wm. Morrow) |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-345-30565-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-345-30565-5 | 277pp. | SC | $? | |
A Town Like Alice is perhaps the second most well-known novel by this prolific author. It tells the story of a young Englishwoman named Jean Paget, one of a group of women captured in Malaya by the Japanese at the onset of World War 2 and forced to march 'round the country for the duration — mostly because their captors don't know what to do with this band of civilian women and children, and so keep passing them along from one local commander to another.
"An officer came presently, when night had fallen, and inspected the crowd on the verandah in the light of a hurricane lamp; he walked down the verandah thrusting his lamp forward at each group, a couple of soldiers hard on his heels with rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed. Most of the children started crying. The inspection finished, he made a little speech in broken English. 'Now you are prisoners,' he said. 'You stay here tonight. Tomorrow you go to prisoner camp perhaps. You do good things, obedience to orders, you will receive good from Japanese soldiers. You do bad things, you will be shot directly. So, do good things always. When officer come, you stand up and bow, always. That is good thing. Now you sleep.'" – Chapter 2, page 40 |
In the process, deprived of adequate food, rest, and medical attention, a good many of the prisoners die. Jean Paget, however, grows stronger and becomes the de facto leader of the group. Eventually Jean, the only single woman among them, chances to meet Joe Harman, an Aussie soldier who's driving trucks that carry supplies for a railroad the Japanese are building. These two strike up a clandestine friendship, and Joe wheels and deals — and eventually steals — to get food and a bit of medicine for the group.2 At length he is found out and literally crucified by a notoriously cruel Japanese officer. The women are marched away and assume him dead. Yet he survives because this officer is unable to grant him his final request: a cold beer.3 The women are left finally with a single Japanese soldier as guard; when he dies of some sickness, they settle down in a Malay village. There Jean, who has learned to speak fluent Malay, arranges that her group will pitch in with the local women to plant and harvest rice. They get fit and the villagers get more rice, which they can sell.
After the war, Jean returns to England. After some deliberation, she determines to journey to Malaya and get a water well built in the village that sheltered her and her group. This transforms the lives of the local women but takes some negotiation. In the course of it she learns that Joe Harman survived the war. She immediately decides to go to Australia in hopes of finding him or at least learning something about him. Once there, she finds that he has gone to England in search of her. She decides to wait for his return. Eventually they do get together and fall in love. It soon develops that, in addition to bravery, Jean has a phenomenal spirit of entrepreneurship. In a few years she has transformed the quiet little town nearest Joe's cattle station by starting a shop making women's shoes and then an ice-cream parlor, with more to come.
Like Shōgun, the story rests on a core of factual exploits. Jean Paget stands in for a Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck, who marched4 1,200 miles around Sumatra in the hands of the Japanese during World War II and came back stronger, with her child intact and healthy. Joe Harman, too, is loosely based on fact.
The story is very well written and, without melodrama, conveys the struggle of the prisoners in a gripping fashion. Like On the Beach, it has been reprinted so often that there are at least 17 different covers for it. And, like OTB, it was made into a movie and later adapted for television and radio. I hugely enjoyed its matter-of-fact narrative and its spirit of persevering in spite of privations.5 And there is a great deal more to the plot; I've provided a very sketchy summary. So far I have only read two novels by Nevil Shute; but I am convinced that this must be one of his best.
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