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Notes -
I bask in your praise.
I really do recommend the book. I read it with a friend from Singapore, and we both expected it to be in large part about the cruelty of the Japanese and the struggle for survival against them. Instead the cruel Japanese are largely a far-group fact about the universe, the primary struggle is within and among the PoWs. The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.
-The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.
I don’t think Clavell saw it that way himself. He was a fan of Ayn Rand.
OT, not having read Les Mis: is Javert nearly as well written as Grey?
It's hard for me to interpret the brilliant scene at the end, where the parachutist liberating the camp looks at the arch-capitalist trader King, and asks why he is well dressed well fed and clean when everyone else is in rags and starved. It's the classic dorm-room smoke session idea of how if an angel or an alien came down, they wouldn't get why some people are rich and some people are poor, man, and how would you explain why one person is rich and another person is starving to them? It's heavy handed!
I don't think he comes down against Capitalism, necessarily. Marlowe, the Clavell self-insert in the best Hemingway tradition, struggles to explain why the King wasn't bad, struggles to explain his glory, after the liberation. And glorious he was! He managed to save Marlowe's arm, and maybe his life! And he could only do that because of his power, which he only had because of his hustle. And to a certain extent, Clavell also simply thinks it right and proper for a man to live by his wits at the expense of others, to risk it all and to dominate or to fail.
It's a very deep and complex critique of capitalism. In many ways, every Clavell novel kind of follows the same plot, with a young Englishman joining a foreign culture and learning its ways. Shogun does this with Japan, Whirlwind with Iran, Tai-Pan with the Hong Kong training colony. King Rat does this, but the culture that Marlowe is indoctrinated into was King Rat's American Capitalism. The King hustles around, yelling things like "Time is money!" and "There's Always an Angle!" and he has a buddy named Tex. He couldn't be more of an American stereotype if he had an Eagle and a Flag tattooed on his arm.
So it's a tough comparison because they are in very different genres, in addition to simply being very different lengths. Characters are drawn differently in punchy 300 page adventure novels that take place over maybe six months, versus 1600 page monstrosities that cover generations with massive asides about the battle of Waterloo and the French Sewers. But in my mind, I liked Javert better as a character, Grey was just a bit too much of a butt monkey for me. Javert is defined by his dedication to rules; Grey is driven primarily by his deep envy and jealousy of the King and of Marlowe.
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