Continuing my progress through James Clavell’s canon, I read King Rat last week. It’s a fascinating book, and very different than Shogun. It seems that during WWII, Clavell was held in Changi prison, a Japanese prison camp in Singapore. Two decades later, he wrote a novel based on his experiences…and that’s what I knew when I opened the book. It was not what I expected.

What I expected was the story of how he was captured, and of interrogations, and sadistic torture, and hot boxes, and solitary confinement—you know, “Bridge over the River Kwai” kinds of things. What I got was very different.

The book begins some months before the end of the war. The Japanese and the prisoners have worked out a sort of detente: the Japanese (or their Korean guards) patrol the outside of the wire, and the British, Australian and American officers keep order inside the wire. Clavell’s stand-in, Lt. Peter Marlowe, is an RAF pilot who was captured in Java. As the novel opens, he befriends (or, really, is befriended) by an American corporal named King, known to all in the camp as “the King”. He’s the King because he’s the guy who can sell things for you and get you money. He can get stuff for you. He, in and of himself, is pretty much the black market in Changi prison. Because of his position, he’s the best dressed man in the camp: he’s got a complete uniform. Few of the others, including the officers, have anything so nice. And because of his position, there are many in the camp, including Grey, the Provost Marshall, who want to see him tumble from his position. Because of their friendship, Marlowe gets tarred to some extent with the same brush.

As I say, this is not a book about sadistic prison guards. But life in Changi is hard, very hard, very, very hard. But the prisoners have learned to survie. They have learned to grow greens, and fertilize them with urine, so that they don’t get scurvy. They have learned to capture cockroaches from the latrine pits, and harvest their protein. The lucky ones keep chickens, because eggs are rich in vitamins and without the vitamins you die of beriberi. There are many different ways of coping, and we see them all. It warps the men…but by the end of the book it begins to seem normal, somehow.

And then the war ends. And the relieving U.S. and British forces come in to save the prisoners and bring them home. And we see the prisoners with new eyes, with the eyes of the newcomers…and we are appalled.

This is not a book for kids; by no means is it a book for kids. Nor is it a book for the squeamish…though, I admit, it didn’t make me squirm nearly as much as your average Stephen King novel. It’s a very good book, and I recommend it.

One last note. As first written, the book had vignettes concerning the wives and the sweethearts of some of the prisoners, and how they coped with their loved ones being gone for years on end. On first publication, these pages were removed. In the current edition, they have been restored…and the book is much stronger for it, I think.

Amazon kept pushing The Hunger Games at me, and so I finally broke down and got a copy of Suzanne Collins’ book. I suppose most everybody but me already knows about it, but here’s the basic premise.

We have a post-apocalyptic society in North America. There are thirteen places where people live: the twelve districts, which produce goods, and the Capital, which consumes them. At some point in the past there were thirteen districts, but the districts rebelled against the Capital, and were put down. District Thirteen was completely destroyed. And to punish Districts One through Twelve, the poorly-named Hunger Games were devised.

Every year, each district must provide two “tributes”, one boy and one girl, to participate in the Games. The Games are a test of survival and blood-thirstiness: twenty-four lads and lasses go in, and only one comes out. The tributes must find food and water, defend themselves against their fellows, and ultimately kill the other survivors in order to win. Our heroine, Katniss, is one of the tributes for District Twelve, a poor district whose tributes almost never win.

Now, the first thing to say about this milieu is that it’s looney tunes. It’s never explained why the Districts put up with the Games or with the drones in the Capital, and since all of the raw materials and food come from the Districts (so far as we can tell), it would seem like starving them out would be fairly easy. Now, the Capital does have access to high technology the districts don’t have, including a variety of flying “hovercraft”, but how they that maintain that technological base given the low population of Panem is unclear.

In short, I didn’t believe in the world for a minute.

That said, Katniss is an engaging heroine. She’s a survivor, and a thinker; she’s got trust issues; and if she’s touchy and inarticulate, she’s also loyal and well able to find food in the wilderness. She’s not been trained to play the Hunger Games, as some of the kids in the wealthier districts are, but her life to date amounts to the same thing. The course of the games is well told. There’s a romance of sorts (and Collins seems to understand teen emotions fairly well), and adventure, sacrifice and heroism. I was especially impressed with Katniss’ relationship with Peeta, her fellow District Twelve tribute. I can’t go into details without spoilers; suffice it to say that Katniss is thrust into an equivocal position, and the confusion in her mind and feelings is handled rather well.

The games are a tad harrowing but not too bad (Collins isn’t Stephen King). The book has a solid conclusion while still leaving the reader wanting more, and there are some obvious threads to be explored in the subsequent books.

So, all in all, not bad. I’ve got the second book, which I plan to read in the near term, and unless I really dislike it I’ll read the third as well, and we’ll see if Collins can stick the dismount.