Pierre Boulle (1912–1994)

Take The Seed and the Sower (that's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence to you visually oriented sorts), remove all the rough trade and fragile beauty and homoeroticism (which basically means removing its spine) and then go further and remove every iota of insight into the human condition or old-hand I-was-thereness or thinly finctionalized historical facts or any of the normal reasons people read books, and you've got the story at the start, of Nicholson and Saito. They build the bridge. Then show more realize you need to give people a reason not to throw this shit down in dismay and add a plodding, unimaginative special-forces jungle-mission story. They tear the bridge down. It's not enough. Boulle was not there--he was a rubber engineer–cum–Free French agent who spent the war cooling his heels in a Vichy prison in Vietnam, and that is a little noble but he doesn't know anything about anything and it shows. He way, way softballs the atrocities of the Burma Road, rendering it a kind of French vision of a British East India Hogan's Heroes (ever watched any French action movies? You're 1/5 of the way to how goofy and unfortunate this is). There is some minor interest in Nicholson, who approaches the world with the rationalizing racist brain of a Victorian engineer--they all do, but for whatever reason he is the one who takes the plunge and agrees to help the enemy and build the bridge harder and faster to show those Japs what real Europeans can do, for his honour, like (this is not how it happened in reality, NB, where honour took a back seat to fucking up the enemy every which way possible took a back seat to self-preservation). A book full of engineer brains is at least potentially a novelty, but then Boulle ruins it by being comically, horribly, ruminate-and-then-suddenly-froth-at-the-mouthly racist agains the Japanese: all the tropes here we've seen before in the bad old style, the bow legs buck teeth little squat stupid slovenly incompetent inscrutable cringing bullying quavering grunting man-apes, the burly brutish Korean gorilla-men, the fact is here though that Boulle really goes that extra mile--he can't get off it for a second, he really wants you to agree with him, like the sweaty guy at the pub or bus stop who won't shut up, that they're subhuman those Asians and that rational Europe (for him, basically, European civilization means bridges and scientific management, the ability to get that little bit of extra productivity out of your employees, this is aaaalmost verging on Nazi-ish stuff here, petty wonder at inhuman efficiency, funny enough). It has that interest as a very pure example of the late-modern late-colonial mentality--"without us these troglodytes couldn't even build a bridge, let's just do it for them so we can get on with spanking them and sending them back to their Emperor"--but in a more meaningful way it is, of course, filthy trash. (It's especially funny because it's the Japanese, who, um, shall we say, know a thing or two about scientific management? Who were turning out aesthetic triumphs and a whole supporting philosophy with their eyes shut while Europe was in training pants and Caesar haircuts? Oh yeah, they're the savages.) show less

This was unexpectedly bad. How much fault lies with the author and how much with the English translation is unclear, but it's a far cry from the quality I expected of what I took to be a genre classic. Our narrator and his two companions, humans stranded on a planet of intelligent apes, make little or no effort to formulate any sort of coordinated plan nor demonstrate the least bit of having any prior training about how to explore their new environment. They haven't a care as they observe show more the planet's savages destroy their only means of getting back off the planet. It's bizarre this doesn't trigger our narrator's temper, which frequently gets the better of him exactly when it will do him the most harm. He makes several poor judgement calls when trying to prove his intelligence.

The second half of the novel is an improvement, once he convinces the first ape. After this the story is only marred by the occasional misstep or plot shortcut. Boulle's intent to write a "social fantasy" allegory alleviates the impossibility of finding any realism here. The premise does have a powerful attraction, the idea of a man desiring his intelligence to be respected by a world of sentient apes who to this point have only seen men as lower animals. It speaks to how haughtily we ourselves dismiss any indicators of feeling or understanding in the animal kingdom as we plunge increasingly more of it into extinction on our own planet. Or - respecting that this is also the author of "Bridge on the River Kwai" - how easily we can see even other races of humans as being somehow less than ourselves.

I'm astonished at how strong a movie franchise stemmed from this lowly origin. But apparently the movie rights were bought before this novel was even published, presumably sight unseen, on the strength of its premise alone. That explains a lot. show less

Despite the fact that this reviewer could not rid herself of a constant mental repetition of “The Colonel Bogey March” while reading this book, it is a truly engaging, if staggeringly frustrating, tale. Colonel Nicholson, an even-tempered British leader of the old school, will not ever let go the basic tenets of gentlemen’s rules of conduct in war. Colonel Saito, in the other hand, is a mercurial and violent man, given to fits of deadly rage – but is himself a pawn in the plans of show more his superior officers. Col. Nicholson and his regiment have been ordered to surrender to the Japanese, who plan to have the prisoners construct a bridge that will connect Bangkok to Rangoon. Col. Saito has no intention of abiding by the rules of conduct laid out in the Geneva Convention, and he orders Col. Nicholson and his officers to do menial labor alongside the other soldiers.
This simply will not do.
Col. Nicholson reminds Col. Saito that his job, and the job of his officers, is to lead the men and to keep them focused on a task, and that the Geneva Convention rules state as much – officers are not required to do menial labor. For this, Col. Nicholson is beaten savagely and thrown into a tiny, baking-hot prison cell. His men, fiercely proud of their leader’s moxie, systematically sabotage all attempts to begin the bridge. Colonel Saito is beside himself with impotent rage, knowing that his own job, and possibly his own life, is on the line if the bridge should be a failure.
What follows is a battle of Titans: one man who would nearly rather die than lose face, pitted against one man who would nearly rather die than ignore the rule of international law. And there is another, parallel story running through the book – this bridge, if it ever gets built, must be destroyed, and the same government that instilled in Col. Nicholson such respect for rules is the agent of the bridge’s destruction. show less

I read this book because I love the original movies and the 70s TV show and, as it's a sci-fi classic, I thought that I should. I was not expecting it to be particularly good, and so was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

At the start, I was rather irked that the translator more often rendered singe as monkey, when clearly we're dealing with APES! After I put that aside, I really got into the story.

There was more of the book in the films than I had expected (although there is a show more different "surprise" ending!). However the main theme is not about how warlike men are (no, You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!), but how decadence leads to cultural stagnation. There's also a very strong, and compelling, anti-vivisection message.

Despite a slight datedness, this still stands up very well. show less