KING RAT [Hardcover]

Much to my own surprise (as generally a non-Fiction reader) it seems I own and have read four of James Clavell's novels ... Shogun, Tai-Pan, Noble House and King Rat. The only one I would even consider re- reading is King Rat as I am afraid that I equate the others as pure "Mental Chewing Gum" akin to soap-operas or the Idle American type television-shows.

King Rat, set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp is his chilling account of how any one of us might descend into exploiting our fellows in inhuman conditions. This ability to evolve, or rather, devolve into a type of behavior of a person we would normally abhor, given the right pressures and circumstances, horrifies me. Could we really fall into such moral turpitude?

I recall the creeping suspicion and the gradual horror of an emerging empathy as I read "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and caution myself that we could all find ourselves as tempted as the "Rat" in those conditions of humans lost in a savage survival.

This novel's one of those a reader finds himself wondering whether he'd have enjoyed it as much if he'd seen the movie first. Probably it's best not to wonder. Steve McQueen made a great hero of the prison camp in the movie, but something was lost. A young man, an entepreneur, finds his element in a Japanese POW camp in Southeast Asia. He's a scrounger, a bargainer, a person who can get whatever anyone needs, wants, yearns for. He charges for it in labor, in goods, in money. All the other prisoners dispise him for what he's able to do, but use him.

This is a story of the human condition, of human weakness, human flaws and blame. Read the book, see the movie and allow yourself to feel the tragedy of a man who's doing what he does best, fills a needed function, earns the hatred and scorn of his betters, all in an environment that ends the day the Japanese surrender.

James Clavell's "King Rat" is hands down the worst of his Asian saga. Only related to the other four by the main character's possession of a "gold ring, signet of the Clan Gordon" (italics) mentioned once on the seventh page. Any reader of Clavell would expect this to have some significance later but the thread never reemerges. Did the author forget about it, carried away by his clearly sophmoric adulation of his Hero? Or did he toss it in at his publisher's request in order to somehow justify this waste of print by weakly connecting it to his better works. And what is this shiftless down-and-out motherless drunkard's son doing with such a treasure anyway? Surely that would have made a more interesting book. Of course, the matural answer is that Clavell is telling his own story, what he lived through as a POW. He has, however, forgotten the first rule of freshman exposition: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it interesting." Certainly, there are traces of the Clavell magic--despite his always hackneyed prose, he is a master storyteller, but in this case the threads lead nowhere and peter out where a quick death would be more merciful. A large theme is built up around a secret radio, but when discovered not once but twice the Japanese commander who has been built up as a terrifying menace offers cigarettes to all involved. None are tortured,jailed or even questioned. It is as if he is uncertain as to whether he wants to write The Gulag Archipelago or Catch 22 and settle for Hogan's Heroes" (of TV sitcom fame). Changi makes Stalak 13 look the Hanoi Hilton. There is even a Corporal Schwarz-like Japanese guard who, like his sitcom counterpart has "no stomach for war" and comes close to saying "I know nothing-Nothing!" Clavell,who knows how to spin yarn, would be great on a campout and we cannot forget the majestic sweep of his four ?good? books, but, like the t-shirt says, "I spent nearly four years in a Japanese POW camp and all could come up with was this lame book. I was going to give the book away but instead chucked into the recycle bin.