Book Review: King Rat by James Clavell
I chose to read this book because a friend of mine, Austin, told me that it was his favorite book. It made me wonder about the favorite books of my other friends and family members — Would their choice of favorite book say a lot about them? Would it be a special way to get closer to them or to better understand their tastes? Reading King Rat with these questions in the back of my mind added a layer of engagement that I really enjoyed. My hunch is that for most people, the answer to the question, “what is your favorite book?” is not super revealing. My own answer to the question, Love in the Time of Cholera, is accompanied by an asterisk because of how long it has been since I last read the book (several years) and how much I may have changed since then. I actually just ordered the book to re-read it.
What would you say that your answer to the favorite-book question says about you?
I also read this book with my co-worker, Sean, as a part of our one-on-one book club focused on Asian writers (I’m a very social reader — reading with someone or reading something with a connection to someone is so much more enjoyable to me). This book was a slight departure from our book club theme because James Clavell is not an Asian writer, but we were curious about the perspective of a white writer like Clavell who wrote many novels set in Asia. As I was reading this book, I was also listening to an audiobook of the most iconic of this writer’s novels, Shōgun. Shōgun, as you can see in the photo below, is much longer than King Rat; the audiobook was over 50 hours long. I read somewhere that Clavell spent three years researching and writing Shōgun, taking great care to do justice to the setting of 1600s Japan. That being said, the commercial success of the novel spurred a boom of “East-meets-West” novels set in Asia featuring English-speaking, white protagonists — I definitely need to do a little more thinking about how I feel about this and about Clavell’s portrayal of Asian people in these novels.
This is a photo of the books of Clavell’s Asian Saga, organized in reverse chronological order from left to right, by year of the book’s narrative*:
- Whirlwind (1979 in Iran).
- Noble House (1963 in Hong Kong)
- King Rat (1945 in Singapore)
- Gai-Jin (1862 in Japan)
- Tai-Pan (1841 in Hong Kong)
- Shōgun (1600 in feudal Japan)
King Rat is the third most recent book in terms of the year of the book’s narrative (1945), but it was the first book he published. Clavell wrote the novel based on his own experiences as a WWII POW in Singapore, at the Changi Prison where, notoriously, only 1 in 15 prisoners survived. Many of the descriptions of the camp and the desperation of the prisoners were so acute and precise that it didn’t surprise me to learn that the story was semi-autobiographical. Apparently, Clavel inserted himself into the story as one of the main characters, a British officer named Peter Marlowe, who struggles with questions of morality, justice, and survival in this brutal setting. Marlowe’s new friendship with The King launches him into a series of thrilling adventures, mostly revolving around food or money, both currencies painfully sparse and valuable in the camp. Clavell’s direct, clear storytelling keeps the reader keenly engaged in the day-to-day drama of survival, sprinkling in just enough inner conflict to add depth to some key characters. Upon finishing the novel, I noticed that there were so few women in the story — a couple of village women who appear on one or two pages, the wives of the soldiers at home who we only see through the soldier’s memories, and a soldier named Sean who plays the role of a woman in the camp’s theater productions. This character of Sean was quite conflicted and, considering when this book was written, I found the portrayal less cringe-worthy than I would have expected. For this reason of featuring only male characters, I could see this book being much more enjoyable or relatable to readers who identify as men (just a guess!).
All in all, I really enjoyed reading this book and hope to read/listen to the rest of The Asian Saga in years to come.
