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feather_ghyll) wrote2022-12-25 08:23 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2022-12-25 08:23 pm
REREAD: A Town Like Alice
I hope you're having a joyous Christmas, to translate what I've been saying all day. The book below was read earlier this month, but this evening I got a chance to finish off my review.
A Town Like Alice: Nevil Shute (my copy is the fifteenth printing of the paperback edition)
I daresay I had the realisation, ’Oh, a town LIKE Alice’ at the same time when I last reread this. Back then, I’d have been was closer in age to Jean Paget, the heroine, than I am now. I vaguely remembered certain points – what happened to Joe Harman during the war, the narrator’s feelings about Jean, and what Jean ends up doing in a former gold mining town in Australia, but I didn’t remember it all so clearly that it stopped me from getting caught up again by the story. Well, mostly.
Shute is quite the story teller. We start off with solicitor Noel Strachan visiting a client for the first time who wants to make changes to his will after the death of his brother-in-law. As they talk through various permutations, unlikely though they seem, it emerges that the client is a chauvinist, (and his lawyer is a little bit too because it’s the late 1930s.)
.
And then the second world war happens, so when the client dies, what had seen improbable has come to pass, the only family member left to inherit his wealth is his niece, and Strachan is a trustee for her until she turns 35. When he meets Jean Paget, in her twenties, she rather flummoxes him. Through him, we learn Jean spent her war in Malaya, as it was then, under extraordinary circumstances. (They were based on something that happened elsewhere under Japanese occupation.) Jean not only watched women and children die around her from physical prvations and ill health, she had to witness the torture of an Australian man who had helped her party, and with whom she’d made a connection. It was a turning point for her and her party, but it and her time in Malaya explain why she was not like most women Strachan had encountered.
A rich woman now, even off the interest of what she’s inherited rather than the bulk, which is in a trust, Jean decides to return to Malaya to offer a well as a gift for the women of the village that helped her, showing something of who she is. She’s not sure what she wants to do with herself now that she doesn’t have to work for a living. There, she hears news that Joe Harman, who she thought had died, had survived. There then follow some huge coincidences, which I was willing to go along with because they felt so huge that they were almost realistic, if you know what I mean, especially as Jean and Joe had been through such fantastic experiences already.
And so, Jean ends up in Australia, in Alice Springs, a rarity in the outback, where most of the other towns are ghosts of their former selves, linked by planes, with hardly anyone living there. After the war, Joe had got a job at a cattle station near one of those towns, Willstown, which Jean proceeded to travel to. It’s obvious both Jean and Joe had carried a flame for each other, although she thought he had died and he had remained under the misapprehension that she was married, which she’d fostered when they first met out of self-preservation. But marriage would mean living at Midhurst station, near a hopeless little town with disadvantages that she can see all too clearly, as can Joe whe he puts himself into her shoes. (Shoes, or footwear and the lack of it are a recurring theme!)
Except that Jean has the means of funding some of the opportunities she can imagine that might overturn some of Willstown’s problems, especially because Strachan inserted a convenient clause in the will, and is a soft touch as far as Jean is concerned. The second half of the story is about Jean adapting to life in a foreign county and circumstances that are not easy (as she had to do in Malaya) but also kick-starting a town’s regeneration.
And it’s a gripping story, from the slightly mysterious Jean comin into an old widower’s life as the world is starting a new chapter of peace, the tale of her survival through adversity, leavened in the telling because we knew she survived. Jean’s choices with her money show that she deserved the reward of finding out that the man she would travel miles for (and vice-versa) was alive, giving her an opportunity at a life as a woman of her age – she had described herself as an old woman after hew war experiences – because of a somewhat begrudging bequest by a relative she barely remembers
Looking at it more critically, the conceit that Noel Strachan is the narrator, retelling what Jean has told him in person or through correspondence, doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny, because as if Jean would have written about some parts of her visit to Green Island where she and Joe are on the verge of throwing it all away until they don’t and get engaged instead. I had a few twitches at a male author through a male narrator conveying a young woman’s thoughts accurately in that area, although it’s obvious that post-war Western women had different mindsets to mine about some things. I struggled to buy into the notion that craving fresh fruit and vegetables is a womanly trait; men get rickets too!
Where I felt the book was most dated was how Aboriginal Australians are written about. It’s not as striking in the Malayan sections, because Jean and co. don’t spend so much time in the company of Malay people, (meaning that Jean’s reunion with the villagers has less emotional impact than it could have had.) Jean is rather unorthodox in her respect towards the Muslim beliefs of the Malayans, although pragmatism is a part of that. The writing’s different treatment of the few Chinese men or Japanaes soldiers she meets to the Malayans is notable, although the difference of ‘the Eastern mind’ is emphasised. But the Aboriginal Australians? If one is being charitable, they are treated as if they were children, if not, one might say they are treated as subhuman by the white characters, including Jean and Joe, which I suppose would be realistic for the 1940s. But knowing that this was all their land and some of the great wrongs done to them by people who were white settlers, it stuck in my craw when Jean was presented as being a bit progressive for thinking she might open up a separate section of an ice cream parlour she’s starting up for Aboriginal Australians. All these decades on, my brain was screeching, ‘But it’s segregation.’
Other than that, it’s a cracking read, especially the chapters where Jean has to convince a series of men in Malaya to let her group of prisoners settle in one village and work the paddy fields rather than tramp dangerousy around the country, or where she, an inexperienced driver and rider, has to travel great distances to help an injured man. I’ve read a few books by Shute, but this is perhaps one of his most famous, and it speaks to the impulses driving post-war reconstruction of the era. I remain less sympathetic of the narrator, who despite his initial denials is somewhat pathetically iLove with Jean – even though he was old enough to retire wen she first met her, and she was as old as his marriage had lasted (his wife dies off the page in the early chapters.) For me, this was Jean’s story, I identified more readily with her than with the male interlocutor, and had a number of less than sympathetic ripostes to Noel Strachan’s wish that he’d met her a few decades earlier. I would make something of the fact that the narrator shares the same initials as Shute but ‘Nevil Shute’ was a pen name, wasn’t it? I see I haven't got a tag for him.
A Town Like Alice: Nevil Shute (my copy is the fifteenth printing of the paperback edition)
I daresay I had the realisation, ’Oh, a town LIKE Alice’ at the same time when I last reread this. Back then, I’d have been was closer in age to Jean Paget, the heroine, than I am now. I vaguely remembered certain points – what happened to Joe Harman during the war, the narrator’s feelings about Jean, and what Jean ends up doing in a former gold mining town in Australia, but I didn’t remember it all so clearly that it stopped me from getting caught up again by the story. Well, mostly.
Shute is quite the story teller. We start off with solicitor Noel Strachan visiting a client for the first time who wants to make changes to his will after the death of his brother-in-law. As they talk through various permutations, unlikely though they seem, it emerges that the client is a chauvinist, (and his lawyer is a little bit too because it’s the late 1930s.)
.
And then the second world war happens, so when the client dies, what had seen improbable has come to pass, the only family member left to inherit his wealth is his niece, and Strachan is a trustee for her until she turns 35. When he meets Jean Paget, in her twenties, she rather flummoxes him. Through him, we learn Jean spent her war in Malaya, as it was then, under extraordinary circumstances. (They were based on something that happened elsewhere under Japanese occupation.) Jean not only watched women and children die around her from physical prvations and ill health, she had to witness the torture of an Australian man who had helped her party, and with whom she’d made a connection. It was a turning point for her and her party, but it and her time in Malaya explain why she was not like most women Strachan had encountered.
A rich woman now, even off the interest of what she’s inherited rather than the bulk, which is in a trust, Jean decides to return to Malaya to offer a well as a gift for the women of the village that helped her, showing something of who she is. She’s not sure what she wants to do with herself now that she doesn’t have to work for a living. There, she hears news that Joe Harman, who she thought had died, had survived. There then follow some huge coincidences, which I was willing to go along with because they felt so huge that they were almost realistic, if you know what I mean, especially as Jean and Joe had been through such fantastic experiences already.
And so, Jean ends up in Australia, in Alice Springs, a rarity in the outback, where most of the other towns are ghosts of their former selves, linked by planes, with hardly anyone living there. After the war, Joe had got a job at a cattle station near one of those towns, Willstown, which Jean proceeded to travel to. It’s obvious both Jean and Joe had carried a flame for each other, although she thought he had died and he had remained under the misapprehension that she was married, which she’d fostered when they first met out of self-preservation. But marriage would mean living at Midhurst station, near a hopeless little town with disadvantages that she can see all too clearly, as can Joe whe he puts himself into her shoes. (Shoes, or footwear and the lack of it are a recurring theme!)
Except that Jean has the means of funding some of the opportunities she can imagine that might overturn some of Willstown’s problems, especially because Strachan inserted a convenient clause in the will, and is a soft touch as far as Jean is concerned. The second half of the story is about Jean adapting to life in a foreign county and circumstances that are not easy (as she had to do in Malaya) but also kick-starting a town’s regeneration.
And it’s a gripping story, from the slightly mysterious Jean comin into an old widower’s life as the world is starting a new chapter of peace, the tale of her survival through adversity, leavened in the telling because we knew she survived. Jean’s choices with her money show that she deserved the reward of finding out that the man she would travel miles for (and vice-versa) was alive, giving her an opportunity at a life as a woman of her age – she had described herself as an old woman after hew war experiences – because of a somewhat begrudging bequest by a relative she barely remembers
Looking at it more critically, the conceit that Noel Strachan is the narrator, retelling what Jean has told him in person or through correspondence, doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny, because as if Jean would have written about some parts of her visit to Green Island where she and Joe are on the verge of throwing it all away until they don’t and get engaged instead. I had a few twitches at a male author through a male narrator conveying a young woman’s thoughts accurately in that area, although it’s obvious that post-war Western women had different mindsets to mine about some things. I struggled to buy into the notion that craving fresh fruit and vegetables is a womanly trait; men get rickets too!
Where I felt the book was most dated was how Aboriginal Australians are written about. It’s not as striking in the Malayan sections, because Jean and co. don’t spend so much time in the company of Malay people, (meaning that Jean’s reunion with the villagers has less emotional impact than it could have had.) Jean is rather unorthodox in her respect towards the Muslim beliefs of the Malayans, although pragmatism is a part of that. The writing’s different treatment of the few Chinese men or Japanaes soldiers she meets to the Malayans is notable, although the difference of ‘the Eastern mind’ is emphasised. But the Aboriginal Australians? If one is being charitable, they are treated as if they were children, if not, one might say they are treated as subhuman by the white characters, including Jean and Joe, which I suppose would be realistic for the 1940s. But knowing that this was all their land and some of the great wrongs done to them by people who were white settlers, it stuck in my craw when Jean was presented as being a bit progressive for thinking she might open up a separate section of an ice cream parlour she’s starting up for Aboriginal Australians. All these decades on, my brain was screeching, ‘But it’s segregation.’
Other than that, it’s a cracking read, especially the chapters where Jean has to convince a series of men in Malaya to let her group of prisoners settle in one village and work the paddy fields rather than tramp dangerousy around the country, or where she, an inexperienced driver and rider, has to travel great distances to help an injured man. I’ve read a few books by Shute, but this is perhaps one of his most famous, and it speaks to the impulses driving post-war reconstruction of the era. I remain less sympathetic of the narrator, who despite his initial denials is somewhat pathetically iLove with Jean – even though he was old enough to retire wen she first met her, and she was as old as his marriage had lasted (his wife dies off the page in the early chapters.) For me, this was Jean’s story, I identified more readily with her than with the male interlocutor, and had a number of less than sympathetic ripostes to Noel Strachan’s wish that he’d met her a few decades earlier. I would make something of the fact that the narrator shares the same initials as Shute but ‘Nevil Shute’ was a pen name, wasn’t it? I see I haven't got a tag for him.