ok novel, better movie. ( )

Bridge Over the River Kwai (1952) is a short genre WWII adventure tale loosely based on real events. Its literary virtues, self-conscious and formulaic, can be attributed to Joseph Conrad's influence (Boulle's favorite author), in particular the novel Lord Jim (1900), about Victorian moral certitudes within a crumbling colonial empire, the ridged view of the system being more important than the individual - old ground for the the modernists by the 1950s. Boulle was French, and the character Colonel Nicholson was based on two actual French officers Boulle had known while in the military - but Nicholson was an old stereotype, more appropriate in World War One, by World War Two he was an anachronism and would never risen to the rank of officer in the British army, at least not without being killed by his own troops.

Boulle is best known as author of Planet of the Apes (1963) and Bridge oddly foreshadows it with a quote about the Japanese: "Monkeys dressed up as men! The way they drag their feet and slouch around, you'd never take them for anything human." He would transfer the relationship between Japanese soldier and Allied prisoner into the future exploring issues of morality between master and slave, man and animal. In the end Boulle is Conrad-light, a generation or two late, with a talent for ironic racism. Excellent movie adaptation as a sheer thriller but looses the depth, what there is.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

Colonel who supervised building saves the bridge, kills one British commando, and calls Japanese to kill another commando. ( )

While the story in this novel is exciting and the characters are intriguing (if occasionally far-fetched), the dissonance between the story of this novel and the actual events by which the novel was presumably inspired is somewhat disturbing, if not outright offensive. An unfortunate aspect to what is on the whole not a bad novel. ( )