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A Town Like Alice: (Vintage Classics Shute Series)

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Shute’s writing style is crisp, concise, and straightforward. There is romance, but he presents it in such a practical fashion that the plot never bogs down in the melodrama of star crossed lovers. ”But Shute was a storytelling craftsman to his bones; an aeronautics obsessive-- there are very few authors who are also excellent engineers. He never constructs a lazy or shoddy sentence, any more than he’d have let the wings fall off one of his aeroplanes.” Malaysia, instead of Sumatra, is the focal country in this story by the author's own admission and choice. The women and children obviously suffered an unimaginable ordeal which could only be stressed in a novel like this, written by a master storyteller. There was no prisoner camps for them set up and the Japanese did not want to take responsibility for them. Their solution was to send them all over the place, from town to town on foot, covering hundreds of miles, hoping to unofficially terminate their lives through exhaustion and starvation. It worked. The Japanese military leaders almost succeeded. Eventually, at the end of the war, the remaining members of the group were repatriated.

What a confused book. A Town Like Alice has been such an intriguing read. The writing had an easy flow to it and the story was certainly gripping, even though this decidedly is a book of two halves. In comparison with the novels, "Garden of Evening Mist' , as well as "The Gift of Rain", authored by Tan Twang Eng, as well as numerous others, this tale softened the experiences of the prisoners considerably. Nevil Shute portrays the ground level Japanese troops as humane towards these wandering innocent victims of the war. It is probably one of the outstanding features in the tale. Interestingly, this is what my grandmother (born 1931) had to say in the letter she sent me with the book: Here is another winner by Nevil Shute. I am very happy to have listened to it narrated by Robin Bailey! I DO love books! I love immersing myself in other worlds….and learning a bit along the way.A Town Like Alice was published in 1950 and generally, I think it has stood the test of time really well. When I first read the book as a teenager, I failed to notice the racism in it, it reflects so clearly the way Aboriginal people were treated in 1950s Australia that you get a strong sense of how taken for granted racist attitudes were. Things are certainly different today.

BOOM IN FILMS ABOUT AUSTRALIA". The Australian Women's Weekly. 21 September 1955. p.60 . Retrieved 17 May 2012– via National Library of Australia.During the last part of the book , I just couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen to Jean or Joe . I'm so glad I was wrong . The second part is a love story. While in Malaysia, Jean met an Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, and they fell in love, or at least in serious flirt. Jean thinks that Joe died in Malaysia and when she learns that he’s alive she goes to Australia to meet him and to see if they might be a true romance. This is your golden opportunity to swoon over Joe Harmon and laugh hysterically at Jean’s sarong problems. Since I’m mostly going to be writing about Jean, let me take a moment here to say that if Joe would stop using racist language for five minutes, he would be a romance hero for the ages – he’s protective of Jean without being patronizing, he risks his life to get her some soap and medicines and food in Malaysia, he knows that no means no, and he thinks it’s great that Jean is an ambitious business woman. Also, if you like your heroes laconic, he’s your guy.

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