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JoseBalow

(8,041 posts)
5. King Rat was an excellent book!
Wed Nov 8, 2023, 01:14 AM
Nov 2023

The movie with George Segal did it better justice than the Shōgun miniseries. But then I'm biased towards George Segal, I love that guy!

I've read many books about prison camps (everything Solzhenitsyn ever wrote, among others) and watched many related movies too. I'd put King Rat up there with best, from both mediums, but I feel like they really softened the brutality and angst in the film compared to the book. Like Solzhenitsyn, You can feel that it was personal...

Shot in the face, [Clavell] was captured in Java in 1942 and sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Java. Later he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.

In 1981, Clavell recounted:

Changi became my university instead of my prison. Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.


Prisoners were fed a quarter of a pound of rice per day, one egg per week and occasional vegetables. Clavell believed that if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he would not have survived the war.

Clavell did not talk about his wartime experiences with anyone, even his wife, for 15 years after the war. For a time he carried a can of sardines in his pocket at all times and fought an urge to forage for food in trash cans. He also experienced bad dreams and a nervous stomach kept him awake at night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell

But I'm definitely with you, everything Clavell has written is great, and the Asian Saga books are worth keeping in the rotation. They're all long reads, but worth every minute burning through them; I wish they were all twice as long!

Ordered by internal chronology:

Shōgun: set in feudal Japan, 1600. 1152 pages.
Tai-Pan: set in Hong Kong, 1841. 727 pages.
Gai-Jin: set in Japan, 1862. 1126 pages.
King Rat: set in a Japanese POW camp, Singapore, 1945. 400 pages.
Noble House: set in Hong Kong, 1963. 1171 pages.
Whirlwind: set in Iran, 1979. 1147 pages (Abridged with some rewritten parts as Escape, 598 pages)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Saga

* That's 5,723 total pages!

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