Review of 'A Town Like Alice (Vintage International)' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
While having lunch with a friend today who works in a bookstore and leans toward cutting edge fiction, I mentioned just having finished reading Nevil Shute's 1950 A Town Like Alice. She gasped; it is one of her favorite books ever.
This surprised me because it's an old fashioned kind of book, the voice that of a London lawyer in his seventies (it was published when Shute was fifty-one), formal, careful. A widower. But the story is a dynamic one, with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II as the background of most of the first half, and the striving of a remarkable young woman there in that part and the rest of it, which takes place in rugged parts of the Outback, the huge, little populated region of Australia's inner landmass.
There are horrific scenes in the first half involving the Japanese occupation which may rankle …
While having lunch with a friend today who works in a bookstore and leans toward cutting edge fiction, I mentioned just having finished reading Nevil Shute's 1950 A Town Like Alice. She gasped; it is one of her favorite books ever.
This surprised me because it's an old fashioned kind of book, the voice that of a London lawyer in his seventies (it was published when Shute was fifty-one), formal, careful. A widower. But the story is a dynamic one, with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II as the background of most of the first half, and the striving of a remarkable young woman there in that part and the rest of it, which takes place in rugged parts of the Outback, the huge, little populated region of Australia's inner landmass.
There are horrific scenes in the first half involving the Japanese occupation which may rankle some these days, but they are accurate. Other things also wouldn't make it into print were the book written today: as admirable as the main character, Jean Paget, is, her attitude toward indigenous Australians is respectful, but hardly progressive.
Parts of A Town Like Alice made me think of those video games in which you construct a city, like the Sims. I've never played those games so I'm not sure I'm right about that, but I liked how Jean's business acumen and desire to create manifested itself.
By the time they had been two days in this country several of them were suffering from fever, a fever that did not seem quite like the malaria that they were used to, in that the temperature did not rise so high; it may have been dengue. They had little by that time to treat it with, no so much because they were short of money as because there were no drugs at all in the jungly villages that they were passing through. Jean consulted with the sergeant, who advised them to press on, and get out of this bad country as soon as possible. Jean was running a fever herself at the time and everything was moving about her in a blur; she had a cracking headache and it was difficult to focus her eyes. She consulted with Mrs Frith, who was remarkably well.
