A Town Like Alice

Nevil Shute — A Town Like Alice

The universe is an unkind place.  After a string of good reads, it has in recompense dealt me an enormous delivery of horse manure in the form of Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice, chosen as a text for one of my book groups.

It’s not exactly a silly book; if it were, I could simply dismiss it.  It is deceptive rather than silly, and this is what made me so bitterly disappointed – it sets up one story (a sophisticated, risky, fabulously well-realised story) in the first half only to renege on that first half in the second (with a whole load of CRAP that makes the vision of the first half look like a total fluke).

The bulk of the first half centres on the wartime experience of Jean Paget, a young British woman working during the outbreak of war in Malaya.  In spite of the war, the British there continue to live their lives much as they always have, mostly because the war doesn’t meaningfully impact on their lives in the Pacific – until the Japanese invasion of Malaya.  The British men are rounded up by the Japanese and put into prisoner-of-war camps: a bad fate, clearly, but one in which, if nothing else, they have a place.  The women and children, however, face a very different fate.  The Japanese pay lip service to the fact that they aren’t making war on women and children, and so the women and children are not put into camps.  Instead, they are passed from pillar to post, sent 100 miles up the road on foot to such-and-such a place where there might be a women’s camp, only to find when they arrive there that there is no place for them; they get passed on to another place in the hope that there might be a women’s camp there, and then another place, no-one ever taking responsibility for their welfare.  They spend six months in this wretched condition and the result, unsurprisingly, is the group of which Jean becomes the default leader is halved in number by disease and exhaustion in this time.

This section is fantastically well done.  Having written my dissertation on women’s fiction of the Second World War, I thought I was pretty well-acquainted with the female experience in this conflict.  This section put me in my place – such experiences as these were totally outside my ken, and the novelty of this story had a great appeal to me.  More than this, though, was the narrative tone of this section, and this was particularly well judged – dry and matter-of-fact, even when recounting the (many) deaths of children as the British contingent’s situation worsened.  This, rather than coming across as cold, seemed to me much more the suppression of huge wells of emotion, a suppression, furthermore, which made the simple recitation of the facts all the more damning – no-one needs wailing and gnashing of teeth to make the sad little deaths of the women and children any more awful, and Shute’s recognition of this is, as far as I’m concerned, magnificently classy.

There is also a really chilling use of detail throughout this section.  Every leg of the walk is gone into in the most deadening detail: the women walk this many miles, this person begins to suffer the symptoms of exhaustion, the group passed by these places, there was this much food when they finally found a village in which to camp at night-time.  This is seemingly endlessly repeated, drubbing the reader in much the same way the women are drubbed by their experiences so that he ceases to consider their further lives, hoping only that they will continue to survive day to day.

The uncompromising nature of the text is crystallised in its central event, the punishment of Joe Harman.  Joe, an Australian prisoner-of-war, comes across the women in their travels and, appalled at their situation, steals some chickens to supplement their extremely light diet.  The chickens are the property of his Japanese commander and, when they are discovered missing, Joe is made an example of for his theft – his punishment being crucifixion.  This is an incredibly harsh scene, and to me, it was the text’s shining moment, because it managed to pull off such a piece of bravura plotting without sensationalism; it’s dignified and appalling and has the ring of truth, and I truly thought that this was turning into my new favourite book.

But then it all goes pear-shaped, spectacularly so.

Much of my complaint with the second half is, I’ve decided, with the preposterous use of coincidence.  The first half is not without some coincidence.  It just so happens that Jean can speak Malay, having grown up there while her father worked in the district.  This means that, when she’s captured as an adult, she, alone amongst the British women, can negotiate with the natives they meet and take the leading role for the British women.  (The BF quibbled with me that “she probably got the job because she could speak Malay” and hence that’s no coincidence at all, but I think it is, as Shute makes very clear that none of the other British women, who may have lived out there for 15 years, have any useful command of the language.  Her command of the language plays a large part in what distinguishes her from the other women, and I would call it a superfluous and coincidental command.)

I can go with that level of coincidence.  But coincidence is abused in the second half.  Jean learns a few years later that Joe didn’t after all die on the cross – when she strikes up a conversation with someone who has only entered the plot in order to give her this information  (RIDICULOUS COINCIDENCE #1).  Then Jean goes to Australiato see him, only to find that he’s only just gone to England, trying to find her (RIDICULOUS COINCIDENCE #2).  He has gone there after a few years because he only just happened to have bumped into an airman (another character air-lifted into the story in order to further the plot, and even more transparently so than the person above) he’d never met before who tells Harman that Jean was an unmarried woman, something Harman had never known before (RIDICULOUS COINCIDENCE #3) — and so on ad nauseam.

Similarly, the use of detail which adds so much to the first half is used again in the second half, but to wholly different effect.  In the first half detail makes their ordeal all the more awful to comprehend.  In the second half, the reader is so overwhelmed with totally incidental and boring detail (you take a train to this place, then wait four days for the mail plane to this little backwater, on and on and on — loads of journeys get made and every single detail of these journeys is relayed to the reader) that the only reasonable reaction is to want to throw the book across the room.

But more than anything is that it feels like Shute hadn’t the courage of his convictions to allow Joe to die and for that to be it, instead fobbing the reader off with a happy ending that just shouldn’t happen; it also retrospectively gives the use of the crucifixion a cheap and nasty taste, put in only for shock value rather than to further some sort of artistic truth.  For the book to have started out so exceptionally daringly with the untold story of these women in Malaya, and to finish with the, by contrast, wholly irrelevant and just plain frivolous story of Jean, Joe and a Queensland populated by one-dimensional good Aussie blokes and sheilas – well, what was the point, Shute, either for you or for me?