A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Originally titled The Legacy
William Morrow & Co., 1950
11/11/11 Category: Modern Classics

So the reason I picked this up at the thrift store was because of the song “A Town Called Malice” by The Jam. That and I liked Nevil Shute’s most famous book On The Beach back in my ill-spent youth of bingeing on postapocalyptic fiction. Then the reason I read it was that the cover blurb sounded interesting—two people survive the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, each in their own way, and end up together because of or despite it.

But the book is kinda weird in how it’s put together. The original title was The Legacy, because the frame story is about this elderly lawyer who is responsible for an estate that’s left to a young woman by her uncle (great-uncle? can’t remember). So it starts with this extended passage from the lawyer’s POV about the uncle, and what kind of person he was, and how the lawyer had to track down the right inheritor, blah blah blah. It takes a long time to get to the girl’s story, which is fascinating, but there’s this niggling little reminder that even when the story moves into her perspective, it’s actually the *lawyer* retelling what the girl told him. Every time it moves back to the lawyer’s perspective, it’s jarring.

But the actual story is interesting enough to overcome that. Jean Paget is a young Englishwoman working for a company in Malaya (sic) when the Japanese invade early in World War II. She, along with a handful of wives and children of other British employees, are captured. Since no Japanese official wants responsibility for them, they are made to walk hundreds of miles from camp to camp with little food, rest, or medical care. Nearly half of them die along the way, and Jean ends up caring for a toddler whose mother and sister are among that number. On the road, the little group meets a pair of Australian POWs who work for the Japanese in exchange for not being locked up in prison camp. One of them, Joe Harman, befriends and helps Jean, and ends up being executed for it…or so she believes. Long after the war is over, when Jean’s lawyer finally gives her the inheritance, she learns that Joe survived his near-death. Joe, for his part, assumed Jean was married (because of the child she carried) and around the same time learns that she’s single. The two go through long journeys before finally meeting again and falling in love. Joe is a cattle station manager, and a good one, and Jean doesn’t want him to give that up—so she learns to love the town near his station, and even turn it into something wonderful…a town like Alice Springs, an anomaly in the 1940s Australian outback.

Jean’s journey is based loosely on a true story, in which a handful of Dutch women were transported from camp to camp in Sumatra during WWII; Shute misunderstood the story and believed the women were made to walk the whole time, which makes the novel oddly more powerful than the reality. Shute clearly loves Australia, and his portrayal of the small towns and the realities of life in them make the book come alive. Though the novel contains the language of racism endemic to white civilization at the time, the non-white characters (both in Malaya and Australia) receive sympathetic treatment and even respect. The white women, for example, have to adapt to tropical life by giving up the trappings of Western culture during their pseudo-imprisonment, with Jean leading the way. On the other hand, Jean’s first business efforts (opening an ice-cream parlor in a small Australian town—it makes sense, trust me) involve a brief conversation about the need to segregate their services because they just “can’t” serve blacks and whites at the same counter. Since the book isn’t actually *about* race relations, I didn’t wince too often.

Shute’s cultural myopia is reserved primarily for the very specific field of women’s sexual desires, but boy, does he miss not only the boat but the entire 8th Fleet on that one. The scenes leading up to Jean and Joe declaring a mutual love are awkward—they each carried memories of the other for years before learning there was no impediment to their being together, so the reality is, well, awkward. Eventually Jean realizes she’s going to have to make the first move, so she dresses in her native sarong (the way he’d seen her long before) to show Joe that she’s attracted to him. The next moment, she’s literally swept off her feet by his embrace. It would be very romantic, except that Jean just stands there like a log and lets Joe kiss her, protests that they’re outdoors where they could be seen, and then lets him carry her inside to his bed.

And there it just gets ridiculous. Although Joe is a virile, attractive man to whom Jean is clearly physically attracted, she barely responds to his caresses, thinking things like “I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, and isn’t it nice that it’s Joe who’s going to do it to me?” and “If he really needs it, I suppose I should let him do it, even though we’re not married.” I realize that women have not always been as unashamed of their own sexual desires as they are these days, but I find it very difficult to believe that someone as culturally uninhibited as Jean Paget would display such a prudish attitude. The whole thing comes off as Nevil Shute never having met an actual woman—or, worse, believing that nice women only ever lie on their backs and think of England when it comes to sex.

I liked this book a lot, but it would have been far more enjoyable without the awkward frame story. Also, it turns out that there are worse ways to write about sex than including a healthy smut scene.