Folks,

Nothing to post tonight. I cannot go down into the gloomy and dangerous archives until I finish my long and painful series of rabies shots. Matron says that the series would conclude faster if I would only run slower. She exaggerates, it is not easy, my friends, to run fast with your trousers down around your ankles. C51 is quite the lad and is much more experienced and better at that than am I. I also need to make certain all my other vaccinations are in order.

I got out my copy of King Rat and scanned through it. It is a good read. All of Clavell's "Asia series" are good.

King Rat, describes the life of a POW (presumably Clavell himself) in Japanese-occupied Singapore during World War Two. The novel follows the struggle for survival of British , Australian and American prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Singapore - a description informed by Clavell's own three-year experience as a prisoner in the notorious Changi Prison camp.

Peter Marlowe, a young British Flight Lieutenant enters the camp and finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between Robin Grey, a British officer & Provost Marshal and the "King", a street smart American corporal. Grey is attempting to maintain strict military discipline and organized cooperation among the prisoners as the means for their survival. The King is the camp's resident "capitalist, living by a code of self-reliance, free-trade and rugged-individualism. It would seem that one of the major characters, Peter Marlowe, is based upon Clavell's younger self.

The novel can be understood as an examination of the ethics of individualism and natural law in opposition to collectivism and legal positivism. In this sense the novel takes on a certain amount of political significance in that it establishes two forms of political ideology. The King relies on free trade to survive, in which he reaps the most reward, although he does help all the men who are associated with him. While the system Grey attempts to enforce is one of Socialistic equality in that every man would only get what was rationed by their captors.

I believe there was a movie made of this novel. Can anyone tell me if this is so and who starred in it?


Originally Registered January,2001 Member Number 3044

"Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed" - Edmond Gwenn, "The Trouble With Harry"

CELEBRATING EIGHTEEN YEARS and over 20 MILLION VIEWS on SNAFU's HWH thread- April 2019