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Genre: Historical: Other, Literary Fiction, Romance
A Town Like Alice is a classic romance (among other things), by Nevil Shute. It was published in 1950, and reflects the bias and prejudices of its time, but it’s also a powerful book about a smart, tough, resourceful young woman. If you really want to go into this spoiler free, don’t read the plot synopsis below – but I’m not telling you anything you can’t deduce from the front and back covers of the book or the plot description on Amazon.
A Town Like Alice is really three stories. Jean Paget, a young woman living in England after WWII, is left a great deal of money by a distant relative. After some thought, she decides to use some of this money to build a well in a village in Malaysia. She tells her solicitor why she wants to do this, and this flashback story of her life as a prisoner of war forms the first part of the book.
The second part is a love story. While in Malaysia, Jean met an Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, and they fell in love, or at least in serious flirt. Jean thinks that Joe died in Malaysia and when she learns that he’s alive she goes to Australia to meet him and to see if they might be a true romance. This is your golden opportunity to swoon over Joe Harmon and laugh hysterically at Jean’s sarong problems. Since I’m mostly going to be writing about Jean, let me take a moment here to say that if Joe would stop using racist language for five minutes, he would be a romance hero for the ages – he’s protective of Jean without being patronizing, he risks his life to get her some soap and medicines and food in Malaysia, he knows that no means no, and he thinks it’s great that Jean is an ambitious business woman. Also, if you like your heroes laconic, he’s your guy.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Joe and Jean discover that they are in love with each other. The only obstacle to their happiness is Willstown. Joe runs a ranch in Australia and the nearest town is horrid, a far cry from the other town Jean visits in the outback (the ‘Alice’ of the title). Jean doesn’t want Joe to leave the work he loves and frankly she really doesn’t want to live in Willstown. Her solution: “We’ll have to do something about Willstown.” After all, if Alice can be a livable place, why can’t Willstown? This forms the third part of the book. Jean is smart, she has money to invest, she has vision, and she’s already survived being a POW. Willstown doesn’t stand a chance, and not only does Joe support her in her endeavors, he thinks she is absolutely awesome because of them (he’s right).
This isn’t a long book, but there’s just so much in it to unpack. A lot of it is horribly sad. Jean is taken prisoner along with several other women and children. There’s no camp for women, so they are marched all over the country. Over half of them die, and that includes many of the children, and yes it’s absolutely awful. What makes it bearable is the incredible resilience of the survivors, and the tactics Jean uses to finally put an end to the marching and make some kind of safe haven for the remaining prisoners. Jean can’t make miracles but she’s very good at seizing opportunities.
It’s also a story about healing – after the war Jean feels “About a hundred years old” and when she finds out that Joe Harmon is alive she begins to come alive herself again. Joe and Jean are touching and sweet and sexy together and very funny. It’s also a story that is very strong in depiction of place – London, Malaysia, and Australia come to vivid life in the pages. It’s a short book full of powerful moments.
Any time I’m reviewing an older book I have to tackle the issue of racism. This book involves characters who are white (mostly English and Australian), Malaysian, Japanese, and Aboriginal. While its language is racist, the messages are pretty complex. Joe uses one particularly racist word constantly, with complete casualness. In many ways the book is hideously racist, and yet in other ways it’s very progressive. Here’s some points that are pretty good for 1950:
- Jean survives in Malaysia because she takes time to learn the language, she respects the culture, and she adopts many Malaysian habits that make her life much easier and more comfortable. This is pointed out to the reader time and again, and white people who look down on Jean for adapting are portrayed as foolish.
- Jean has the Malay women design their well. She presents some ideas but then she sits back and lets them figure out exactly what will best serve their needs. A lot of aid agencies today are still having problems with this basic concept.
- This is, in part, a story about the Japanese treatment of POWs in WWII, and many atrocities are described. But the Japanese characters are described as individuals, with their own personalities and motives, and many of the soldiers are “as kind as their orders allow.”
- Jean is not a revolutionary figure. She doesn’t end segregation in Willstown. However, she is adamant that if she can’t serve the aboriginal people in her ice cream parlors and shops, then she will have to build an adjacent shop for them. “We can’t leave them out,” she says, and it’s implied that she takes some flak for it.
- Jean makes assumptions about the aboriginal people she meets, but by the end of the book there are hints that she is getting to know them better. She develops a greater understanding for a woman who married a white man and who can’t bear to be parted from her kitten (Jean assumes the woman is childish but after spending a night alone at Joe’s station she realizes that the woman is lonely). When Jean has trouble understanding an aboriginal person, she doesn’t assume that this person is stupid and she doesn’t blame him for speaking in a heavy accent – she blames herself for not having acclimated enough to understand it.
Nevil Shute loosely based the character of Jean on a woman he met who had had similar experiences in Sumatra. His friend, Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck, marched 1200 miles through Sumatra with baby under similar circumstances. He tells her story briefly in the afterword to Town Like Alice. According to the Nevil Shute Foundation, Shute misunderstood the story and actually Geysel-Vonck’s party was transported from place to place. Regardless of which version is accurate, Geysel-Vonck’s tough, resilient, and humorous personality made a huge impression on Shute.
He loosely based Joe on Herbert James “Ringer” Edwards, an Australian soldier in Malaysia who was tortured on the Burma Railway and narrowly escaped execution.
I’ve read this book dozens of times, and each time I have a different take on it. In my most recent readings, I was struck by the complex treatment of racism and by how unconditionally Jean and Joe accept one another. They are very funny together, with terrific chemistry. They are adamant that they will not attempt to change each other, even though they are both willing to change themselves. They trust each other completely and they balance each other well and they have great sex (off page – it’s implied) and I love them so much.
Shute’s books are not revolutionary or visionary. What seems to interest him as an author is the heroism of the ordinary person. Often his books start off quite boring – A Town Like Alice kicks off with a description of the solicitor’s life in London, which is fantastically dull. I believe he does this on purpose, to show that heroes come from the most mundane backgrounds and settings. Jean herself doesn’t think of herself as heroic despite having saved seventeen lives. “I only did what anybody could have done,” she tells an admirer, who answers: “That’s as it may be…The fact is, that you did it.”
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Thanks!
Good review. I’m a great fan of Neville Shute. At the time they were published, his books would not have been classified as romances but as popular novels read by men and women.
Racism (and all the other isms) in older books is a marker of how things have changed. It’s good to learn how things were. And I think I prefer an older contemporary book which accurately reflects the period over a modern historical book which glosses over or completely rewrites then prevailing attitudes.
I read this about ten years ago, after seeing the television adaptation with Bryan Brown. I enjoyed the book, but I enjoyed the TV show more because it played up the romance aspects a bit more, and seemed less dated.
The movie version of this with Peter Finch is also great. It leaves out the last act but I enjoyed it a lot.
I haven’t read the book, but I did recently (last summer) see the movie version with Bryan Brown. I really enjoyed it. Your review makes me want to read the book now too.
I stumbled across this book about three years ago and loved it because of the many admiring points you made in your review. The characters just seemed so *real*, and yet Jean was in many ways, for me, an ideal heroine.
I love her pragmatism, her will, her straightforward kindness, her integrity, … hah, just about everything about her! But she never, ever felt like a “Mary Sue” to me; she had real flaws, as you point out, but was willing to work on the ones she became aware of.
This is one of my favorite Nevil Shutes (the other is Pastoral) and one of the things that’s fascinating about it is that the attorney himself, though aware he’s much too old for Jean, is still half-in-love with her himself.
The racism is problematic. There’s no way at that period, for it not to be problematic and still be realistic.
For another take on the racism problems, read In the Wet.
I do love this book. Nevil Shute deals with racism again in another book, “The Chequer-Board”, which touches on a lot of the attitudes towards Asians and black people (African-American and African-British) during and post-WW2. Again, there’s a lot of racist language, but there’s also some ruthless shredding of assumptions.
I wish people knew more about Nevil Shute aside from “On the Beach”.
When my BFF and I were prepping for a trip to Australia, she insisted I read this first. It was a wonderful reading experience, and Jean and Joe remain one of my favorite romantic couples. Thanks for reminding me of how good Shute’s books are. Time for a re-read!
One of my favorite books not just by Nevil Shute but by any anyone ever. It’s a very insightful view of human nature and about the effects of war.
For those who like alternate history, I highly recommend his In the Wet, an alternate history of England after WWII which is a bit more overtly political than his other works but still has a lot of character insight (and a romance, of course!)
This conjures up wonderful memories of a family vacation on the Oregon coast one rainy December when I was a teenager. We habitually went driving around looking for tiny local thrift shops to buy jigsaw puzzles and books with which to spend the time in our small wood cabin, and my papa picked up Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute. He loved it so much that by the end of the holiday everyone in the family had read it. I have so many warm fuzzies associated with that book.
I read this for my AP English Lit class in high school and haaaated it and now I have no recollection of why. I think I thought it was pretty boring, but I also loved “The Grapes of Wrath”, so who knows what high school me was thinking. But I should definitely give it another try now that I’m older and wiser.
Despite all its issues, it remains one of my favorite books. Thanks for the great and honest review. 🙂
I haven’t read this book in years! Reading your review reminded me that I loved it when I read it.
Also enjoyed The Far Country.
I love this book! I haven’t read it for years, but I still think with admiration about Jean’s determination to make her new community a place she could stand. I’m always struck by how actually-good her ideas are. Like she understands that communities need women for the bachelors to form families with so the community can grow. But the town is so horrible that young women leave if they are at all able. So she essentially comes up with ideas focused on retaining the young ladies, reasoning (I think correctly) that if you build it for women, men will come.
The whole book seemed packed with insights about the human condition of this type. Really worth reading, in spite of unsavory-to-contemporary-eyes treatment of racism.
Gosh, I so loved both this book and the Bryan Brown tv adaption. (I’ve never seen the Peter Finch version, but I saw that Amazon has it so I may need to treat myself.) I’ll check out some of the other book suggestions here, too.
And does anyone remember Tenko? I’d love for that to be made available in some format for US viewers.
It never occurred to me to pick up this book, although I’ve heard of it, I had no idea what it was about. Sold, going on my TBR list.
I love this book. Many books written at this time also suffer from the same “racism”. Its not that the books ars purporting racist ideas (often the opposite) – its more in some of the language – an almost unthinking racism on the part of the writer. But … you just read it in context. “The world of Suzie Wong” (Richard Mason?) is another similar one. Nice story and love story set in Hong Kong in the 1950s – very evocative of Hong Kong and explores the theme of colonialism – but …. some of the language especially in the description of people of different races makes me squirm.
In terms of ” A Town like Alice” – there are so many stories about POWs in Malaya ( as Malaysia was called then) and Singapore. I grew up in Malaysia so its like part of a narrative history. And I also loved Tenko (watched it growing up) and also wish I could purchase episodes of it. You could also try “paradise road” which is on Netflix and stars Cate Blanchett in what I think is her first movie.
As an Austalian I grew up with the books of Neville Shute on the bookshelves at home and still have a soft spot for this English writer who so well depicted the laconic Aussie hero Joe in A Town Like Alice. The 1950s movie starring Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch and later TV miniseries starring Helen Morse and Bryan Brown were both excellent in cast and story-telling. I believe both were wise to concentrate on the first two thirds of the story. Another Neville Shute story set in Australia against the background of the Snowy Mountain scheme (a great post-war engineering feat) ,The Far Country, was also brought to the small screen in an interesting miniseries starring Michael York and Sigrid Thornton, so those of you who enjoyed the book might like to seek it out. I believe Neville Shute was very good at showing ordinary people , who when placed in extraordinary situations, showed courage and determination. I believe The Pied Piper which tells the story of an elderly English gentleman who leads a group of children to safety during the German invasion of France during WW2 demonstrates this unassuming heroism that ordinary people show in such situations. Yes the books are dated and the racism shown by characters offends our modern sensibilities but If we concentrate on the humanity of his characters he really was an excellent story teller.
This has got to be a joke, this book has got to be one of the most awful reads ever, it is complete and utter bullshit. I have never seen so much fluff in one book and i dread the day i ws forced to read it. XOXO
Great review and well done for pointing out what was progressive for the 1950s.
My feeling is the Malaysian / Muslim sensibilities are treated with more sensitivty than the “boong” references which are a) constant b) made fun of c) ineffably unreflecting.
The first third of the book moved me to tears but the whole “let us regenerate Willstown” section bored me.
And the overly romantic depiction of both Joe and Jean ultimately diminishes the book. It lacks subtlety in this area. Tough selfless Aussie meets tough English lady. …. too cliched …
I have never seen Nevil Shutes novels made into movies. I love the author and i have over the years collected almost all his books numbering about 20 or more. In my youth I used to read and reread his books. There will be a war, planes or ships with a bit of romance thrown in.
One of the best Nevil Shute books -and there are a bunch to choose from. Good review – you have it right, the way Shute picks out the heroic from characters who could seem mundane. To understand the guy further, I cannnot recommend too highly “Slide Rule” – his autobiography of his years as an aeronautical engineer in the U.K. In the 1920-1930s.
Thanks for the reminder about this book. I read it years ago and loved it.
Good review. I was getting sick of hearing (audio book) boong and lubra. I can see the positives. I still think I would rather read something that deals with racism in a more contemporary way. But glad I read this ‘classic’. On to other better reads.