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Title: Shame and the Captives
Author: Thomas Keneally
Narrator: Paul English, Heather Bolton
Format: Unabridged
Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-17-14
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
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.
Members Reviews:
As far as it goes....
Mr Keneally sets out that Gawell is not Cowra but like Cowra, but the events described at the Gawell Prisoner of War camp fairly closely match the actual events at Cowra and with one or two embellishments of flaws and features most of the identifiable characters, so why not base it there and be done with?
In re-telling the events of August 1944 story does not displace itself from the facts for the fiction to be suspended enough to be believed and the opportunities Keneally creates for a more intriguing story of possibilities out of those events never quite burst into their own lives. Basically I was left with a slightly more padded version of Harry Gordon's' "Die Like the Carp" without the gruesome photos, or indeed my mothers own recollections of the "word on the streets of Cowra, where she grew up, a teenager of 16 in 1944. He does enough to honour the known acts of heros, but in Abercares fictional death, the lives that could be honoured were lost.
What could have been, especially after his ambiguous but clever conclusion to Daughters of Mars, was not another mirror to the imperial Japanese Warrior soldier, but an incursion into their view of the alien, surrounding them. There were moments, the memorable line about how they wondered that it did not snow despite getting so cold, or the offering of scones, but fundamentally, Tom left me with a conclusion that two tribes went to war and just did not or could not understand each other. It is at that point the potential of this book is exasperatingly lost. How did Aoki return to life and wait for death to approach, explain to his family not only his lost honour of capture, but his shame of the stain on his soul of China?
While in war anything is possible, the notion that Alice would have a relationship with Giancarlo in the way it unfolded, did not strike me as particularly plausible, I could imagine personal conflict of feelings, and perhaps a passionate breakout, but Alice was not a woman like Nora, she would not have played the game that way.
