Shame and the Captives

A Novel

By: Thomas Keneally

Narrated by: Heather Bolton, Paul English

“If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs staged the largest and bloodiest prison escape of World War II.

Alice is living on her father-in-law’s farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian inmate at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband’s treatment. What she doesn’t anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will change the way she understands both herself and the wider world.

What most challenges Alice and her fellow townspeople is the utter foreignness of the thousand-plus Japanese inmates and their deeply held code of honor, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive in battle and preferring a violent death to the shame of living, the Japanese prisoners plan an outbreak with shattering and far-reaching consequences for all the citizens around them.

In a career spanning half a century, Thomas Keneally has proven brilliant at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this profoundly gripping and thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident in New South Wales in 1944, he once again shows why he is celebrated as a writer who “looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match” (Sunday Telegraph).

Unecessarily complicated wording!

I feel darn brutal giving this book only one star, but I did not like it.

It is a book of historical fiction which parallels the Cowra Breakout. In August 1944 over a thousand Japanese prisoners of war escaped from an internment camp located near Cowra, a small farming community in New South Wales, about 300 km west of Sydney. There is an adequate epilogue that explains what is fact and what is fiction. So if you are curious about the event maybe you want to read this book.

Some events described are violent. Just a word of warning.

Doesn’t everybody know how the Japanese feel about the shame of surviving war? This is a central topic of the book. Another theme concerns how people may feel obligated to treat prisoners of war justly so that their own prisoners of war will be treated well too. This I found terribly far-fetched, at least how it is presented in this book.

Along with the events of the breakout are fictional love relationships which in my mind are told crudely. They feel as padding to the main story. And so predictable.

The breakout is “exciting” but the lead up takes forever. Remember that padding – it doesn’t draw you in.

I don't like the author's choice of words. This is the central problem I had with the book. Over and over again I thought what a strange way the author had of expressing the events – both what happens and the individuals' thoughts. Too complicated. Strange words used when what is to be said could have been so simply stated.

OK, here is one insignificant example: "She opened the oven and was inspecting the lamb and probing it with a fork when the telephone rang. Fork in rigid hand, she immediately suspended her inquiry into the condition of the meat......" What is it with “suspended her inquiry”? I mean you could more simply say: she poked the meat, and then the telephone rang. Strange language! Not All the lines are strange but so many that you take note. It drove me crazy.

The audiobook is narrated by a man and a woman Heather Bolton and Paul English. This is because the story flips back and forth between a woman on a farm and the internment camp. The narration is good.


Why do you read historical fiction? To teach history by folding the events into an entertaining, engrossing story. Well I didn't get that here.

Unabridged?

They say unabridged, but I heard the first few pages and the narration jumps several paragraphs.