A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. When she is captured she joins a group of other women and children whom the Japanese force to walk for miles through the jungle, leading to the deaths of many. Due to her courageous spirit, Jean takes on the role of leader of the sorry gaggle of prisoners. While on the march, the group run into an Australian prisoner, Joe Harman, who helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished as a result. Jean’s adventures, and her bond with Joe, form the heart of this gripping and moving story.

This is a book in two halves: the first based in Malaya and the second in Australia.

As many books seem to do, A Town Like Alice starts with a solicitor in London. Jean does not appear on the scene until some chapters in, which kept me wondering how the main character was connected to this solicitor. When she does appear, it is revealed that she is working in west London.

Jean’s story then unfolds, beginning with her life in Malaya in the first years of the Second World War. As the blurb says, the Japanese invade Malaya and they force Jean and a group of women to walk long distances to different parts of the country, all in the heat of the Malayan sun. The women are repeatedly told that they are walking to a prison camp but, at the end of each part of their gruelling journey, they are simply told that they need to walk somewhere else, often hundreds of miles away. Many of the women do not survive. This part is actually based on the real experiences of a group of Dutch women in the Second World War who were forced to walk all over Sumatra. Many of them also perished along the way.

The section of the book set in Malaya is very evocative and at times distressing to read as it describes the brutality and poverty in which the women were forced to live, with no end in sight to their journey. It also kept me wondering how Jean came to return to London, what happened in between, and what direction the book would go in once the war is over.

It’s difficult to write about the second half of the book without revealing a major spoiler so I will keep it vague. Most of this section is set in Australia. Jean initially travels from place to place, and I liked the fact that she is rarely in a rush to get to each town as she is not short of time (a very different experience to my own travels with my limited annual leave!). Shute also describes rural Australia very well, and conveys a sense of the vast distances between the different places Jean visits, including Alice Springs.

However, I felt that this section of the book lacked direction. Jean embarks on various projects, and there is a dramatic rescue scene at the climax of the book, but I felt that it was all a little strung-out and ended a little too neatly.

When I finished A Town Like Alice, I had the sense that I had read two books in one. Perhaps the second half of the book would be better suited as a sequel to the first one. That said, the first half of the book is really excellent, and the fact that it is based on a true story makes the bravery of Jean and her companions all the more impressive.

‘What does the country look like?’ she inquired. It pleased the man to talk about his own place and she wanted to please him; he had been so very kind to them. ‘It's red’ he said. ‘Red around Alice and where I come from, red earth and then the mountains are all red. The Macdonnells and the Levis and the Kernots, great red ranges of bare hills against the blue sky. Evenings they go purple and all sorts of colours. After the wet there's green all over them. In the dry, parts of them go silvery white with the spinifex.’ He paused. ‘I suppose everybody likes his own place,’ he said quietly. ‘The country round about the Springs is my place.’