Shame And The Captives (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series), by Thomas Keneally
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Shame And The Captives (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series), by Thomas Keneally
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On the edge of a small town in New South Wales, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, lies a prisoner-of-war camp housing Italian, Korean and Japanese soldiers. For their guards and the locals, many with loved ones away fighting, captive or dead, it is hard to know how to treat them - with disdain, hatred or compassion? Alice, a young woman leading a dull life on her father-in-law's farm, is one of those with a husband held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian POW and anarchist, 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 expand her outlook and self-knowledge. But what most challenges Alice and the town is the foreignness of the Japanese inmates and their culture, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive, they plan an outbreak, to shattering and far-reaching effect. In a career spanning half a century, Tom Keneally has proved a master at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this gripping and profoundly thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident 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.
Shame And The Captives (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series), by Thomas Keneally- Amazon Sales Rank: #5480970 in Books
- Brand: Keneally, Thomas
- Published on: 2015-03-04
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.30" h x 5.50" w x 8.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 589 pages
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. He is best known for Schindler's Ark By Nobody Thomas Keneally's new novel, Shame and the Captives, is elegantly-written but also tragic and violent. It explores the consequences of culture clash in an Australian prison-camp town during World War II.Keneally, the winner of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in literature this year, is a consummate storyteller, a graceful stylist, and a prolific writer of more than 30 novels. He is best known for Schindler's Ark, the winner of the Man Booker Prize in 1982, but my favorite is Woman of the Inner Sea, a story of a woman who starts a new life in the Outback as a barmaid after her children die in a fire and her wealthy philandering husband blames her.In the introduction to Shame and the Captives, Keneally explains that it is "a parallel account, or a tale provoked by the events" of a violent outbreak of Japanese prisoners from a camp in Cowra in New South Wales in Australia in 1944. (The name Cowra is changed to Gawell in the novel.)This entertaining character-driven novel has a huge cast. It begins with twenty-three-year-old Alice Herman, whose husband Neville has been a prisoner in Austria for two years. She leads an uneventful life on her father-in-law's farm. When a truck drops off some Japanese prisoners to work on the road, she is excited and curious. She makes lemonade for them, and hopes some woman will be similarly kind to Neville in his prison.he theme of shame is explored throughout the novel. Alice is desperate, sexually-starved, and angry because she barely knew her husband before he was captured in the war. When an Italian prisoner, Giancarlo Molisano, comes to live and work on the Herman's farm, Alice initiates sex with him. He is more intelligent and sensitive than she, and when he indicates his reluctance to continue the affair because of his loyalty to her father-in-law, it becomes clear that he is her captive.The prison camp holds Japanese, Italians, and Koreans, and the Japanese are the angriest. Tengan, a young Japanese pilot with long lashes and wide-set eyes, is so ashamed of having been captured that he dreams of killing the guards and then committing suicide. Many of the Japanese prisoners would rather be presumed dead than captured, and hence fail to reply to their relative's letters. Sakura, a professional female impersonator, shares their beliefs: when the time comes for suicide, she will don an appropriate costume.The officers at the camp have deceptively simple lives. Major Bernard Suttor, the commander of Compound C, spends his free time writing his popular comic radio serial, The Mortons of Gundahah. which also distracts him from fear for his son, a prisoner in China. Old-world courtesy causes the stodgy Colonel Ewan Abercare to make a decision with fatal consequences for more than 200 people. Corporal Headon, an eccentric Great War veteran, is in charge of Machine Gun A, and his devotion to following the rules seems absurd until it becomes essential.The novel does ramble a bit--there are just too many characters-- but the plotting of the Japanese prisoner's outbreak is razor-sharp.There is no subtext: this is a gracefully-written, disturbing page-turner. It is a good historical novel based on real events. If you like that kind of thing, you'll like it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A major cultural misunderstanding By Suncoast This is an interesting and challenging book about one of the three main events where WWII impacted directly on the Australian people. Most people know about the bombing of Darwin and the mini-submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, but how many know about the bloody escape by Japanese POW's from a camp near Cowra, NSW?During WWII Australian troops captured many prisoners of war on all battlefronts. While some of them were sent to POW camps near where they were captured, by August 1944 there were nearly 20,000 POW's in Australia. Most of them were Italians, but just over two thousand were Japanese most of whom resented the fact that they had not been killed - "The Japanese soldier never permits himself to be taken".Keneally weaves a fictional story based on the Cowra POW breakout which shows the conflicting culture and emotions of the local people, the camp administration and the different prisoner nationalities. In a fictional town of Gawell, on the tablelands of NSW and far from the battlefronts, a POW camp is built close to a farming community to house European (mostly Italian), Korean and Japanese prisoners. The camp is split into 4 compounds, 2 for the Europeans, 1 solely for Japanese (Compound C) and the fourth for captured Japanese merchants, and Koreans and Taiwanese.The camp commanders have little understanding of the cultural stresses Japanese prisoners are facing with the disgrace of their capture. Many Japanese give false names, knowing that their families would have been told of their death because they are missing. Many look to death as the only way out of their incarceration and do not understand the compassion and respect given to them by their captors.Keneally weaves a gentle story of the local community and the integration of trusted Italian prisoners, and the camp commanders and their naive feelings that they should run the camp humanely within the Geneva Convention in the hope that Australian prisoners will also be treated humanely by the other combatants. The camp is lightly guarded because a breakout is considered unlikely. The camp is commanded by officers who are in general mostly too old or injured to fight overseas. What surprised me most by this fictional re-enactment of the breakout was the inept, almost Dad's Army reaction, of the guards and the local training camp to the escape of hundreds of Japanese prisoners from Compound C searching for death.This is an interesting and sensitive tale based on an important incident in Australia's WWII history. I have recently read Keneally's splendid WWI saga "Daughters of Mars" and in comparison found the writing style of this book to be much dryer and less inspiring than his previous book.A copy of this book was supplied by the publisher for an honest review.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. historical novel or non-fiction narrative? By Igor Dumbadze I was inspired by Flanagan's Narrow Road to the Deep North, to explore some writing by Keneally. The books are well written and deal with a part of the war and a part of the world, that most of us Eurocentric individuals, never visit or know much about. My only criticism of this book, is that I did not think it was really "historical-fiction", but rather a "non-fiction historical account" with some characters to simply drive the narrative forward. Nothing wrong with that, but it made for some very slow and rather dry reading - especially if you were focused on a "novel". The characters were fairly stereotypic, and seemed to mostly reinforce the themes of the book, rather than evolve over the course of the story.Once again, good book - if that is what you are looking for; otherwise this could have been condensed into a much shorter narrative.I give this 3 stars for a "historical novel"; I give it 4 stars for a "non-fiction" book.
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