King Rat (Clavell novel)
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Noble House |
King Rat is a 1962 novel by
King Rat was the first book published of Clavell's sweeping series, the
Plot summary
The novel opens in early 1945. Peter Marlowe, a young British
Despite being an
Through the experiences of Marlowe, King, and other characters, the novel offers a vivid, often disturbing portrayal of men brought to the edge of survival by a brutal environment. The P.O.W.s are given nothing by the Japanese other than filthy huts to live in and the bare minimum of food. Officers from various parts of Britain's Asian empire, accustomed to having native servants provide them with freshly laundered uniforms daily, are reduced to wearing rags and homemade shoes. For most, the chief concern is obtaining enough food to stay alive from day to day and avoiding disease or injury, since almost no medical care is available. Some are degraded and come close to losing their humanity, while others display levels of courage and compassion beyond expectations. Some literally steal food out the mouths of their comrades, while others give away what they have or take terrible risks to help their friends.
King decides he and his friends should breed rats to sell for food. His comrades, though nearly starving themselves, are repelled by the idea of eating rat meat, so King comes up with the plan of only selling the meat to officers without telling them the true source. A group of officers who stole money from their underlings are later seen greedily enjoying a meal of what they are told is mouse deer (rusa tikus in Malay), not knowing they are actually eating rat meat. When the camp is ultimately liberated, most of the soldiers have trouble adjusting to freedom. King loses his power and is shunned by the others. Grey ironically thanks King on the grounds that his hatred of King was the only thing keeping him alive. At the end the rats are abandoned in their cages when the camp is abandoned. The final scene has the rats consuming each other one by one, with the final survivor becoming "king of the rats".
Characters in King Rat
- The King – a shrewd American corporal; at the end of the novel he is sent back to the United States under an impending investigation for illegal profiteering in a prison camp and Marlowe never sees him again
- Peter Marlowe – the protagonist, a young upper class British fighter pilot who later becomes an author; based on James Clavell
- Robin Grey – a young British lieutenant from the lower classes, the Camp Provost Marshall [MP], and the antagonist to Marlowe
- Percy Smedley-Taylor - British Colonel named Camp Commander, responsible to the Japanese for the P.O.W.s; later appears as a director of Struan's Holdings, MP, in Clavell's subsequent novel Whirlwind.
Two characters from King Rat also appear in Noble House (published 1981), a novel set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, when Marlowe is a writer visiting Hong Kong to conduct research about the great British trading companies there. Grey, embittered by his failure to obtain a commission in the postwar British Army despite his suffering during the war, has become a radical socialist Member of UK Parliament and is also in Hong Kong on an official visit. Unknown to Marlowe, Grey has become a secret Communist and a Soviet agent who tries to thwart efforts to improve relations between China and the West.
Film adaptation
A film adaptation was released in 1965,[1] the first of several of Clavell's novels to be so adapted.
See also
- Changi (miniseries), fictional Australian POWs at Changi
References
- ^ Crowther, Bosley (2009). "Adaptation of Novel by Clavell Has Premiere". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 23 January 2009. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
- King Rat. ISBN 0-440-14546-5.