"A town like Alice" by Nevil Shute

This is a book of two halves. The first part tells of the experiences of a young woman, Jean Paget, who is with a party of British "mems" captured by the Japanese in Malaya and treks around Malaya under guard before ending up in a Malayan fishing village. During these adventures she encounters a captured Australian who falls "fowl" of the Japs. 

The second part tells of her adventures in Australia after the war and contrasts a quite businesslike description of the power of capitalism to build an outback village into a town with a somewhat sedate (by today's standards) love story. 

 The first part is compelling reading. The second part one tolerates because one wants to know what happened. The story is told by a quaint English solicitor who becomes trustee for the young woman. He is clearly a man of his time (I suspect he would have been old-fashioned even then) and this narration device is cute but lends the whole book a slightly musty air. 

 The author's style is very matter of fact. I believe Shute was an aeronautical engineer (who worked on the R100 with Barnes Wallis; he was English by birth but emigrated to Australia after the second world war) although he sounds like a journalist. He has a very direct, simple style and the plot is clear; there are no complicated literary mannerisms to get in the way. 

 It is clearly of its time. It is casually racist. There is a clear distinction between the white mems in Malaya and the native women, although here he clearly has sympathies with the natives; the white women who survive do so because they adopt the native way of life. There are references to Negroes and Abos; an aboriginal woman is described as a lubra and is clearly no fit mate for a white man; it is important to the Australian farmers that they have white cowboys because the abos can't be trusted. The most shocking event to my mind was the fact that the forward thinking businesswoman who set up the ice cream parlour deliberately created two counters, one for whites and one for "boongs" because "I don't think you could serve them [the boongs] in an ice-cream parlour, with a white girl behind the counter." 

 It is also slightly funny in its depiction of Australian speech with the swear words changed to "mugger" or "mucking" and the frequent use of (one suspects bowdlerised) phrases such as "oh my word". Finally, although it gets quite risque when she gets half-naked in front of him, they wait until they are married! 

 Nevil Shute is a writer I have never read before. He is very much out of fashion although he was clearly very much in fashion when this was published (1961): it was "specially chosen" as the 1000th Pan paperback. I am glad I have read this book and I would now like to read "On the beach" (read it now, Sept 2022) but I haven't missed great literature. 

 March 2009 314 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God