A Town Like Alice

"They spent that day in a curious mixture of love-making and economic discussion." (pg. 259)

Just over a year ago, after devouring the excellent war adventure Pied Piper, I was excited about adding some more books by Nevil Shute to my reading list. This excitement was tempered by On the Beach, which passed but not with the flying colours I expected, and it has been significantly shaken by A Town Like Alice.

I struggled to get through it: usually, I pick up a book and finish it before picking up another one, but with A Town Like Alice I have finished three books which I have been reading alongside of it, one after the other, and have started a fourth, before finally closing Alice. I should stress how extremely rare this is for me, but I show more did not have the endurance for a book which, to my great disappointment, turned out to be a real chore. Whenever I did pick it up again, it never came with any pleasure.

The book is, on the face of it, a sweeping, romantic epic: a hardy Englishwoman and a resourceful Australian PoW meet and fall in love whilst imprisoned by the Japanese in Malaya in 1942. He steals some food from the Japanese for her, and she is told he has been executed. But, after the war (and by a rather laboured coincidence), she discovers he is alive. Having inherited a lot of money, she travels to Australia to find him and together they build a thriving new town – 'a town like Alice [Springs]', she says – in the outback.

It is, however, excruciatingly dull. The most interesting stuff – the treatment of Allied PoWs and civilians by the Japanese – is dealt with quickly in the first third of the book and without much drama. This first third also contains a long set-up which examples what sadly become the dominant traits of the novel: an extended sequence where a solicitor – our narrator – and an old man set up a legal will (the money that Jean, our hardy Englishwoman, eventually comes into). There are two problems with this. Firstly, it is extremely dull, like the minutes of a business meeting, as Shute spares us nothing of the minutiae of the thing. Second, it is unnecessary for the plot, at least in such length. Why not a short chapter in which the solicitor recounts his encounters with this old man, rather than a drawn-out extrapolation of their every banal utterance? You wouldn't want to sit in on such a meeting – it would be like watching paint dry – so why should the reader of a piece of fiction do so?

The second third of the book comes after the war, and sees Jean inheriting the money. She returns to Malaya and builds a well as a thank-you for a village that was kind to her during her Japanese imprisonment. This is actually a good segment, and well-written, but then Shute spends a lot of unnecessary ink in gearing the story towards Jean finding out Joe (the Australian PoW) is alive and then flitting full of sound and fury (signifying nothing) between Malaya, England and Australia. Shute is inexplicably keen on detailing all of her boring travel plans ("I'm going to take the such-and-such to such-and-such, then take the connecting whatsit to such-and-such" – "Oh no, you'd be much better going to whatsitsname and then on to such-and-such through the…" Later: "She took the such-and-such from…") and any narrative momentum or goodwill that might have remained from the first third of the book has well and truly dissipated. And when Jean does make it to Joe's Australian town, she finds out that he's gone out to England looking for her, and now we follow all his travel plans. (Just as she has found an inheritance, he has won the lottery – another laboured coincidence). By this point, I didn't know if I was going to make it out of the book alive.

The final third finally settles down on one place (for the most part) – Willstown, the 'town like Alice', as Jean sets to work improving it and making it prosper economically. Sadly, the habits from the previous section carry over: we dwell on the mundane ins-and-outs of the town and of the various activities (when making a pair of shoes, Jean uses small tubes of Durofix for fixative, don't you know (pg. 216); when she wants to make an investment in a local business, our narrating solicitor has a meeting with a shoe-selling businessman who thinks 'Jean's estimates of capital were on the low side, but not excessively so' (pg. 231)). I can tell you're on tenterhooks already. If you find epic, romantic adventure in overdrafts, business capital, local livestock economics and by-laws, this is the book for you.

Even leaving aside these already-fatal flaws, A Town Like Alice does itself few favours. The main characters are not all that likeable: Jean is hyper-competent and infallible, whilst Joe (and all the Australian characters, really) just says 'oh my word' all the time in a moony, bumpkin-ish voice and speaks in gimpy slang. The narrating device is clunky – particularly later on in the book when the solicitor is no longer a main character – and the prose is stodgy and stolid, never seeming to know where the high points of the drama are.

At first, I thought I might have been turned off by the rather cold and antiseptic design of my House of Stratus edition (2000), but I have read similarly-designed books and, when they've been good, I've forgotten about the design as I've been immersed in the story. With A Town Like Alice, I laboured throughout. Too much time is spent on slowly pivoting around the various plot points than on the plot points themselves, allowing Shute an excuse for his meticulous and seemingly pathological descriptions of legal, business and travel arrangements. And yet, despite these slow and methodical pivots, it is remarkable just how much of the plot only comes together because of some fortuitous coincidences. (Forgivable if that was the only flaw, but not with everything else.)

I have not yet given up on Shute, as I still remember fondly how much I enjoyed Pied Piper, and as the next of his books on my shelf is the wartime adventure Most Secret, there may be hope for me yet. Because this one was almost completely bloodless. I don't mind detail or context in a book, or spending time in the town like Alice; it's only that Shute doesn't seem to realize how boring it is to watch the paint dry on the bloody place. show less

‘A Town Like Alice’ was recommended to me with significant caveats, and I think anyone else considering reading it should know what they are getting into. I’ve read one other Nevil Shute novel, [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772], and in that case the nuclear apocalypse distracted me from some extremely troubling treatment of women. In ‘A Town Like Alice’, the misogyny is much more pervasive and there’s also copious racism. First, the sexism. Shute does better than Hemingway at making his female characters actual people, but that is a very low bar. The main character in this book is Jean Paget, a practical and resilient woman who I liked a lot. I was show more much less keen on the fact that the book is narrated entirely by a man forty years her senior who is obsessed with her. While he doesn’t do anything especially creepy about this, it makes the descriptions of her body and her dynamic with her fiance especially unsettling. When Joe and Jean get together, Shute describes it as attempted rape. The scene is extremely uncomfortable to read and includes such comments as, ‘She stood unresisting in his arms it never entered her head to struggle or try to get away.’ and ‘She thought, It had to happen sometime, and I’m glad it’s Joe. And then she thought, It’s not his fault, I brought this on myself.’ He stops after she says, “If you can wait till we’re married, I’d much rather, but whatever you do now, I’ll love you just the same.” Then she apologies for ‘tantalising’ him by wearing a sarong - on a beach in Australia. This is bad enough, but the sense of it being an assault is reinforced by repeated subsequent references to the bruises that Joe left on her. The whole scene is perhaps the least romantic and most depressing proposal I’ve ever read.

The reader follows Jean through the Japanese occupation of Malaya during WWII, back to England postwar, a return to Malaya after inheriting money, then settling in Australia. As depictions of times and places in history, these travels are interesting. They certainly give a powerful and depressing insight into mid-20th century colonialism. When Jean and other white women are rudely deposed from their colonial throne after the Japanese invasion of Malaya, they are treated as badly as the native population. This suffering, which is severe and shocking, promotes a humility and willingness to treat the Malayan people as equals. Unfortunately, this attitude does not seem to survive the war, although Jean remains very grateful to the specific village that helped her to survive.

When she gets to Australia, racial segregation is all-pervasive. For instance, Jean wants to open an ice-cream soda parlour and immediately assumes that she would have to open another separate one for aboriginal customers. I don’t know enough about Australia’s history to say whether this was statutory Jim Crow-style segregation, or whether it was enforced by convention. Either way, it’s frightening to see this woman, who the narrative otherwise depicts as sensible and admirable, treat black people with condescension at best. All the white Australians in the book act as though aboriginals are not actually people. It’s horrific, frankly.

Although the most memorable and compelling part of the book takes place during the war, the majority of it concerns Jean’s subsequent time in Australia. She attempts a one-woman rural regeneration project, which unfolds as an idealised vision of how external investment should trickle down through a community. To give Shute his due, he does make this process interesting and the depiction of Australia is vivid and atmospheric. Overall, though, the novel really has not aged well. I preferred [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772]; all the main characters in that were white men so sexism and racism were much more subtextual, and it dealt with the end of the world. ‘A Town Like Alice’ is ostensibly a story about survival and renewal, yet I thought while reading it that the way of life presented was not one that should survive. It relied upon the subjugation of women and anyone who isn’t white, plus the copious use of DDT to kill insects, all of which have disastrous consequences. show less

I knew the title of this book, perhaps from the play on words of The Jam's song 'A Town Called Malice', but had no idea what the story was about. The first half of the novel, based on the real life mistreatment of Dutch female prisoners of war by the Japanese on the island of Sumatra, was very powerfully written and took me by surprise.

Like the 1980s series Tenko, a young woman named Jean Paget and thirty other women and children are taken prisoner by the Japanese and marched around Malaya by guards who can't or won't find a camp for them to live in. While being moved between small villages, Jean meets an Australian soldier called Joe who tries to help the women by 'acquiring' drugs, soap and food for them. When he is caught by the show more Japanese, Jean believes that he has been brutally killed and blames herself. After the war, the story - narrated in plain, undramatic language by Jean's London solicitor Noel Strachan - shifts to London and then Australia, after Jean inherits a considerable sum of money, managed by Noel and his law firm, and returns to Malaya to repay the villagers who helped her and the other women to survive. She makes a shocking discovery while abroad which prompts her to move to the Australian outback and apply her magic touch to a small town there. Although the novel is billed as a romance, the Australian chapters reminded me much more of The Flying Doctors than purple prose like The Thorn Birds, with the dramatic rescue of a stockman thrown in for good measure!

Jean Paget, told through the elderly but lovesick eyes of Strachan the solicitor (and a male author) could have turned into a bit of a fantasy figure, but I found myself believing in her strength and admiring her pragmatic nature. She herds the dwindling group of women and children through Malaya, taking on the smallest child of one woman who dies, and liaises with the local communities, knowing how to speak the language. When the last Japanese guard dies, she arranges for them all to pay their way in a small village by working in the paddy fields. In Australia, determined to make the small Gulf town where she settles into 'a town like Alice' (Springs), she sets up a shoe-making factory and builds an ice cream parlour, cinema, laundrette and swimming baths to persuade the young women to stay in town and not leave for bigger cities. Jean is one-woman dynamo who is deprived of her own voice - Strachan is retelling her story through the letters she sent him - yet her success at the everything she touches is strangely admirable and not annoying.

Published in 1950 and written about the war years, there is a good deal of racism in the story, especially in Australia, although the Japanese guards in Malaya are not all portrayed as monsters, and of course sexism is at the heart of the plot (Jean's money is put in trust until she is 35!), but both forms of prejudice were (and possibly still are) sadly true to life. The animal cruelty is also hard to read - 'Oh, do you need a soft lining for your alligator skin shoes? I'll just pop off and kill a few wallabies, leaving their motherless babies to be raised on the station at pets.'

I found this a very engaging and educational story, with a strong female protagonist - and a good book with which to finish the year! show less

It's rare for me to give a book five stars, but this book is an absolute gem. The prose is lovely without being overdone, the plot is engrossing, and the characters were finely drawn. I can't wait to read every book Nevil Shute ever wrote, and will consider it an honor to do so.

One thing Shute does incredibly well is create a sense of place and atmosphere. He does it with plain straightforward prose which you could almost call 'workmanlike'. From the Wilkie Collins-esque setup, where an elderly lawyer in rainy Scotland begins his narration; to the hot steamy danger of Malaysia in the war; to Australia's Top End and over to outback Queensland, the reader is firmly in place every time. Shute is a storyteller you can trust (in every way but one - more on that later). We know we are in good hands.

In all his novels (or at least those I've read), Shute writes mainly about good people who are doing their best wherever they happen to be. His characters are courageous and kind, hard-working and just, so the drama lies show more less in their character development than in their extraordinary situations. Yet there's something more to it than a mindless thriller - in this novel there's a wandering over the world, searching for one's right place in it. People overcome great hardships and make good. It has a vast geographical scope and a generous spirit throughout. And it all escapes being anything like a moral tale, far from it. It's a page-turner and a ripping good yarn.

Many things that are most interesting in this novel are things that Shute himself never intended. He is an author of his times, firmly entrenched in mid-century British ideas and values. This novel of Australia is firmly in the colonial mindset and reveals a great deal about post-colonial thinking and culture. I learned so much about my parents and grandparents in reading this book - realising that their values and ways of looking at the world come straight out of this era, this not-so-very-old and terribly white Australia.

And the racism! Oh, the racism. It hurts badly, from the very first moment we meet the first Australian character in the Malaysian jungle. This is what makes this novel so conflicting and difficult for me. The thing is this: Shute is not in any sense writing a book about racism. He's inside it, part of it, unable to see outside it, like a fish in water. And it's what seems to me a specifically Australian type of racism, and to my mind the worst kind. There's no hatred in their attitude to Aboriginal people. No emotions at all. No anger, no violence, nothing to work with. It's a casual assumption that black people are sub-human. It's offhand, dismissive, ingrained. Aboriginal people have names like Moonshine and Palmolive - white people have named them like dogs. And if you read this book be warned and prepared for the dreadful word "boong" to be used casually and often. I never thought I'd be so shocked about racism that is of its time, but I was. I still am. In fact I think the book is important for that alone; it shows where we've come from, and how recently, in this country. No wonder the problems are still there, still so strong, still so baffling. Up until the 1950s, Aboriginal people were officially listed as part of Australian flora and fauna. This book is of that mindset, and is horrifyingly illuminating, without in the least intending to be. show less

In many ways, this novel is complete rubbish. If I were to be as gentle as possible, I'd say this: it has aged horribly, but the first section is a page turner. I read it out of an interest in all things Australian Lit, yet it is worth noting that more than half of the book takes place outside of Australia and it is written by an Englishman with an English central character. It isn't surprising that the characters are deeply racist colonials or that it holds antiquated ideas about sexuality, but the narrator/author seems to have thought that the racism of the heroes in this novel would make them more heroic or endearing. As if we should celebrate Jean for setting up a segregated store or that she would sometimes admit that Asians and show more Aboriginal people are almost human. The second half of the novel is a tedious account of business development fantasy. For the small moments of insight into life during wartime in Malaysia and rural Australia I had to fight my through page after page of boring business and logistical details and/or antiquated ideas about sex, race, and gender.

Looking at the other reviews of this novel, I'm not sure how so many of you can stomach the repeated treatment of native Australians--look up the history of the slurs that they are being referred to as and think about how they are named and treated like animals. Can you really admire Jean when you understand her in the context of a colonial master and puritanical ideologue? show less

One day Jean Paget gets a phone call - she is the sole beneficiary of her uncle's will. However - there is a catch - he did not trust women so the money will be in a trust for a very long time. From that point the story moves in two directions - back to the war in Malaya via the memories of the young woman and forward to a future which noone expects. The story of the will form the backbone of the story weaved by Shute but it is the other 2 parts of it which make this novel memorable.

We get to hear the story second-hand - the lawyer, Noel Strachan, who is the executor of the will and in charge of releasing funds when requested, is our narrator. But he does not see most of the story - Jean tells him the part in Malaya and she sends show more letters about the story ones she leaves England. Add to this that Noel is at least half in love with his young charge and objectivity is the last thing you can get from the old man writing a story, long after he had initially heard some parts of it and knowing that she will never see Jean again.

And the story is fascinating (and horrifying) - Jean almost died in Malaya when the Japanese forced her and the rest of the women and children they found in one of the towns to march across the country for months. Except that she was too stubborn to die - so instead she became the leader of the small party and managed to find a way to survive - with the help of some local people. And now, having enough money, she wants to go back and help the same people who saved her from starvation. It is like a chain of good will - they helped her, she helps them when she was able to and that leads to her learning that a man she had given up on as dead is actually very much alive. And off she is to Australia to find him - without any plans on what she would do when she does find him (or so Noel tells us anyway). In the meantime, Noel gets a surprising visitor and decides to meddle.

The third part of the novel, the one set in Australia moves a lot slower than either the Malaya or the London/around the world one. Jean finally finds where Joe, the man she believed dead, lives and ends up in the middle of nowhere in the Australian Outback. So what do you get from a woman who have access to money and is used to making her own way through the world? A change of course - it may be a backwater but it is her backwater (as she sees it) so it is time for it to change. The novel turns into a story of Outback development where Jean just cannot set a foot wrong (but don't forget who the narrator is). There is enough action - from calves being stolen to a broken leg and a man almost dying, from flooding to finding a way to be accepted in the community. She wants only one thing: "a town like Alice" (aka Alice Springs - the jewel of the Outback). And somewhere in there there is also the big love story - too perfect, too proper, almost too big for the pages.

This is the first novel by Shute I had read and I loved his style. Even if some parts were less captivating than others (the "how to develop the Outback manual" aka the third part of the novel can be a long-winded in places but even that somehow worked).

PS: At the end of the novel, the author adds an author note explaining that the Malaya story did not happen - not in Malaya anyway. But a version of it happened elsewhere. show less