A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot.
Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s experience with one client. The client, Jean Paget, has an interesting life, but much of that is filtered through long tedious exposition by the solicitor, which is an unnecessary framework that adds absolutely nothing to the story. (Turns out Shute himself was a solicitor, which explains a lot)
Parsing out the actual plot, we finally get to the main protagonist Jean Paget. Born in colonial British Malaya in 1935, she grew up in England, but retained the Malay language of her youth. This came in handy when she was hired as a secretary in KL. Then came the Japanese invasion.
Before Jean could flee to Singapore, she was captured along with a bunch of other English colonials. The men were sent off to work on the infamous Railway of Death, but the Japanese captors had no real plan for the women and children. The group were forced to march 10 or 15 miles a day, with hardly any food and no medical supplies, from one Malayan town to another. Each destination turned out to have no place for them, and sent them further along.
They plodded back in despair; at Alor Gajah Judy Thompson died. […] In the middle of May, at Ayer Kuning, Mrs Horsefall died […] in two days, probably of heart failure or exhaustion. The faded little woman Mrs Frith, who was over fifty and always seemed to be upon the point of death and never quite made it, took over the care of Johnny Horsefall and it did her a world of good.
[…] They left four tiny graves behind the signal box at Bahau.
Eventually the remaining 17 women ended up in a small Malay village, with only one Japanese guard who then died. They embedded themselves in the village for the remaining three years of the war, working alongside the Malay women to plant crops and grow food. A few years after the war, when Jean came into some money, she returned to the village and built a well and washing house, so that the Malay women in the village would not have to walk to the river each day. This much of the plot is based on a real life story, and it shows.
If only Shute had stopped at this point. And if only he had chosen to delve deeper into the interactions between the English and Malay women, what they learned from each other, how these connections changed them, and how they developed a shared humanity.
Alas, this is only the first third of the book, and the author went in a completely different direction for the remaining two thirds. During the Malayan marches, Jean had briefly met a young Australian who helped the women, and who was eventually tortured for that help. On her postwar Malaya trip she discovers that he survived, and rushes off to Australia to find him. Almost simultaneously, he wins the lottery and discovers that Jean was unmarried, and rushes off to England to find her. Eyeroll.
Oddly, Jean has absolutely no interest in connecting with the English women who marched and worked alongside her through the war, or the child she looked after for 3 years (which is called ‘it’ for much of that section!).
Shute clearly loves Australia, but there’s are no luscious descriptions of the terrain or the wildlife. Instead we get stolid descriptions of farming economics in the outback, or the compIications of traveling from point A to B:
“You could come back with me to Clonecurry and then go by train to Townsville and up to Cairns. I don’t quite know how long that would take in the train — it must be between six and seven hundred miles. Or you could wait here until next Wednesday, today week, and go by the Dakota straight to Cairns in about two and a half hours.
I don’t think [the train] goes every day from Townsville to Cairns, but I’m not really sure. I think you’d have to allow three days. Of course, the best way would be to fly from Cloncurry to Townsville and then fly up to Cairns……
which are not likely to endear the reader to Shute’s beloved country. I also noted that in the male-heavy outback of this novel, pretty English Jean is treated by every man with courtesy and kindness, and never subjected to so much as a wolf-whistle let alone an unwanted pass, except by her beloved.
This novel was written in the 1950s and I was expecting colonial attitudes.
[The Australian] smiled slowly. “I thought you were a lot of boongs,” he said. “You say you’re English, dinky-die?”
Unpleasant but realistic, and it seemed nicely subversive for Shute to show Jean’s growing acceptance of the Malays as equals. But then we get to Australia, and the depiction of the aborigines is unbearable.
The sensitive, intelligent face of the manager of the Carlisle, Eddie Page, who had married his illiterate, inarticulate lubra.
This may be realistically reflective of the attitudes of time and place, but what’s harder to take is Jean’s complete acceptance of the bigotry, at the same time as she is determined to upend the rest of the social culture in the small outback town.
“Joe”, she said, “what do I do if a boong comes into the ice-cream parlour and wants a soda?”
He scratched his head. “[..] I don’t think you could serve them in an ice-cream parlour, with a white girl behind the counter.”
She said firmly. “Then I’ll have to have another parlour for them with a black girl in it.”
She’s got two girls employed in the icecream parlour, and one lubra.
The novel becomes frankly ludicrous during the Australian section. Jean had been a secretary for 2 years in a shoe factory, and based on this ‘experience’, she hand-makes a pair of alligator skin shoes with wallaby-skin linings. These are impressive enough for a firm in England to promise to buy anything she makes. She starts a factory, hires women, and without a single hitch, has a thriving business in months. She also starts an ice cream bar, a fresh vegetable shop, a dress shop and other ventures. Her astounding success causes no resentment or irritation in the town, and they are wholly supportive. Did I mention that she also produced two babies during these three years? And caused a decimation of the wallaby population? And drove cross country then rode 40 miles to save an injured Aussie, despite having minimal driving or riding expertise?
The calm but spunky Jean of WWII Malaya morphs into a simpering housewife once married, despite being a business tycoon, and her typical conversation with Joe is along the lines of
“Oh Joe, I couldn’t have said that! “
“You wouldn’t like me to do that?”
I recall Shute’s On the Beach as having an interesting sci-fi premise, fairly well executed. A Town Like Alice hasn’t aged well, but that is partly because it was very flawed from the start.
Ah, such a pity it is so flawed. I usually like to read books set in Malaya, but will give this one a miss!