Zilele astea am făcut o incursiune prin podul casei, să mai scutur praful de pe cărți.
De aici și până la a reciti a opta oară „Changi” de James Clavell n-a fost decât un pas.

Ce carte de debut! Ce autor monumental! Mă înclin în fața ta, Clavell!
Imaginați-vă un lagăr de concentrare situat pe o insuliță din sudul Asiei. În al doilea război mondial, între 1942 și 1945, acolo și-au făcut veacul mulți din prizonierii capturați de japonezi. Din 100 de mii, câți erau la început, la final au rămas doar 10 mii de schelete ambulante.
Cartea ne descrie lupta lor zilnică pentru supraviețuire într-o lume în care nu doar gardienii erau dușmanii lor, ci și bolile tropicale, insectele, foamea și decăderea morală.
Nu conta dacă erai australian, englez sau american. Gradele nu mai contau, făceau parte dintr-o lume trecută și demult uitată.
Tot ceea ce conta era capacitatea de adaptare.

Publicată sub titlul de KING RAT (adică Regele Șobolan), cartea e un adevărat manual pentru antreprenori. Cuprinde legi fundamentale legate de comerț, speculă și arta de a supraviețui, a deveni cel mai bun.
Pentru că Changi nu este doar un lagăr ca toate lagărele, ci un loc unde viața se ia de la zero iar cel mai puternic și mai isteț urcă treaptă cu treaptă pe scara unei ierarhii nescrise.
„Trebuie să ai grijă totdeauna de Numărul Unu!” este principiul de căpătâi al personajului King (tradus ca „Împăratul”), un caporal oarecare din armata SUA, devenit prin forțe proprii stăpân absolut peste lumea lagărului.

Nu te apuca de afaceri înainte de a citi cu atenție această carte și... nu te apuca de scris cărți înainte de a citi această carte!
Îi dau cinci stele doar pentru că nu pot să-i dau mai multe! Fir-ar, cred c-o s-o mai citesc încă o dată :)

От тези книги, в които героите са толкова добре развити и истински, че са ти като приятели. Тъжен съм, че свърши.

This could almost be billed as the serious, Asian version of the movie 'The Great Escape', and so I was not entirely surprised to discover that James Clavell wrote the screenplay for that film, and the book has a cinematic quality to it. POWs in barracks and digging trenches or tunnels are a feature of both. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed the film or book 'Empire of the Sun', the TV series 'Tenko' or even the film 'Bridge Over the River Kwai'. This is full of incident, great characters, a surprising amount of understanding and tolerance for all points of view and an understandable amount of horror.

I had always dismissed James Clavell's books as too popular, too thick and not worth taking the time to read. Anyone alive in the 1980s seemed to have 'Shogun' and 'Tai-pan' on their bookshelves and there are a suspiciously large number of them floating around secondhand bookshops and being passed on through BookCrossing and bookswap shelves. 'King Rat' was donated to my expat club's bookswap and I was going to pass it on without reading, but then I noticed it was set in a POW camp in Singapore and was intrigued as I enjoy books set in different countries and times and it was only 320 pages long, so not one of his usual doorstops. I am really glad I read this and am now considering reading another of his books. In fact, apparently two of the main characters here, Marlowe (the main character) and Grey (the troublesome military policeman), feature in a later novel, 'Noble House'. If the story is as well told as 'King Rat', it will be worth reading.

As the author was interred in Changi Camp himself, we can assume a high level of historical accuracy; though the story does not claim to be a true account of one man's experience, it has the ring of truth about it. There must have been men there who behaved just like those in the story and the incidents Clavell describes probably took place too. I couldn't help but be reminded of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, based on his own experiences in a Japanese POW camp in China. The descriptions of the King's set-up in 'King Rat' with his bed next to the window and an overhanging canopy and his lackeys carrying out his every command could have come straight from the film version of 'Empire of the Sun', with the boy Jim running errands for a character similar to King, Basie.

EDITED TO ADD:
Here is a blog with stills from the film - http://pyxurz.blogspot.nl/2011/08/kin.... I'm pretty sure I've never watched it, something I will have to remedy.

It also occurred to me that there was something in the book which puzzled me; there was no mention of what happened to the Japanese and Korean guards once the war had ended. Apart from that, the end of the book gave a good impression of the utter disbelief about the concept of a single bomb which could destroy a city and the confusion and fear for the future as a war comes to an end. 'King Rat' does an excellent job at painting an accurate picture of the conflicting feelings and moral dilemmas of war and captivity.

За книгата само една дума - брилянтна!

Overall (with the exception of the ending) this book was a solid five stars and is second only to Shogun in my opinion. There are so many things going on in this book, and I could not stop turning the page.

The ending on the other hand was extremely anticlimactic - hence my four-star. Sofar I have read the first four books in the Asian Saga including King Rat, and all of these books have an ending that falls flat. I was so angry when I read about what happened to the King. His sudden change in status is never really explained, and only if Clavell had made all of his endings good (Shogun was the only one with a halfway decent ending), then this series would inch its way over to a five-star rating.

Set in 1945 in Changi prison towards the end of the war, a story of men imprisoned on poor rations for months and years, and the growing relationship between a young British RAF officer and an American corporal, King. King is the best and cleverest black marketeer and operator in Changi. The desperation of all the camp inhabitants is all the more real when you know the author was in Changi himself for 4 years - this was his first novel, published in 1962.

To be honest, this was my least favorite James Clavell book. Set in a WWII POW camp ... it's easily the darkest of all his books, although each are permeated with their own sadness or tragedy.

However, if I'd bothered to know that the book is "—a description informed by Clavell's own three-year experience as a prisoner in the notorious Changi Prison camp. One of the major characters, Peter Marlowe, is based upon Clavell's younger self." -- I may have appreciated it more.

I read this book a very long time ago, I was still at school (where I had also seen the film), and I still remember the book and my reactions to it. I liked the book a great deal because it was harsher than the film and some things in the novel shocked my tender 16 year old self to an extent that I never forgot them. Things like men going blind for lack of nutrients, one source of which were fresh eggs. But many men traded their eggs, often to the 'female' star of the theatrical productions put on in the camp who was of course an attractive man in drag. He was courted and treated as a woman but when liberation came the men turned on him and stoned him to death. The scene of his death was deeply disturbing, no doubt because I was queer boy struggling to understand himself in 1974. I must be clear that there was no hint of approval of the treatment of this drag performer in the novel it was an example of the savagery and hypocrisy the underlay so much of the motivations of those in the camp.

This was not a simplistic or standard prison camp novel. I think in many ways the various characters and scenes were an attempt to explain the moral and political failings of nations in class via the actions on individuals. It was, I thought far more subtle, then the film, but it could be because so many more stories could be told. That didn't stop aspects of it being clunky. The dislike of the working class officer Grey for the upper class Marlowe foreshadowing the post war election defeat of Churchill, the creation of the Welfare State and Britain's withdrawal from empire. The American 'King' seemed an obvious stand in for the ways and methods that militarily and economically powerful, but untutored USA would play in the world, guided by the old world verities of Marlowe.

'King Rat' as fiction being used as an exposition of how power politics worked and developed is pretty clunky and I thought so as a teenager. It was good on the prison camp as a microcosm of the larger world and how individuals act when put to the test. The 'King' is actually more honest in his opportunism than the British officers who should be providing leadership but in fact stole from their own men by cheating of rations. No one comes out good, except maybe Marlowe and his very niaf goodness and old fashioned beliefs and standards didn't convince.

I have not reread this novel nor read anything else by Clavell, in fact I'd forgotten that 'King Rat' was by him. It was never a great novel, though it had great things in it. You'd be far better off reading 'Empire of the Sun' by Ballard if you want a real novel about a Japanese camp (but a civilian rather than military one). If you want to understand human beings being pushed to extremity I wouldn't recommend Clavell or Ballard but 'Fatelessness' by Imre Kertesz.

My final reflection on 'King Rat' is that it is a novel of its time and it may still entertain but there are better novels exploring how man behaves in exetremis.

Having read and being blown away by Shogun earlier this year I was keen to try out more from James Clavell but wasn't quite ready for something quite so massive...

King Rat was in many ways more accessible in terms of length and surprisingly most of the character interactions were better the English speaking prisoners and I believe that Clavell himself had spent time captured in a Japanese POW camp which added considerable authenticity to the conditions that the characters were facing. This would be a great place to start with reading Clavell if you were interested to see if his writing style is for you without having to commit to a massive 1000+ page door stopper.

Although I do not read much historical fiction, particularly from this era, I was again impressed by Clavell's character work and enjoyed seeing all of the manoeuvring and scheming and the examination of how greed and capitalism can take hold even in desperate conditions.

From reading both King Rat and Shogun, I can confidently say that I will be reading everything else in the Asian Saga now...

The story of ‘King Rat’ by James Clavell takes place in an enclosed small wartime POW camp with imprisoned English, Australians, and some Americans. Japanese soldiers guard the camp which is surrounded by jungle and Malay villages. It is standalone despite being labeled as #4 in the Asian Saga.

There is not much food, no medicine, incredible heat and biting insects. Soap is rare, privacy almost nonexistent. Men die every day from disease and despair. Clothes have rotted away and sarongs and rags are all that's available so rank is made known only by arm bands and a slight difference in living huts. Rank and class are important to the British who try to maintain discipline but there is corruption and theft of food.

The Americans are under the thumb of a superb entrepreneur who manages to have nice clothes, lots of food and Japanese money through great risk-taking in black market trading of food, soap and medicine. He is called the King and the other men are for forced to do his bidding such as light his cigarettes and tolerate his cooking of rare delicacies such as fried eggs while they starve, hoping for his table scraps in exchange for deals with labor, watches, lighters, and rings.

The King works hard in getting the deal, forging unholy alliances with villagers, Japanese and Korean guards as well as the allied prisoners. People survive longer because of him if they have something to trade. Although he is only a corporal, he is really the king of the camp. However, almost everyone dislikes him to some degree. Staying alive is difficult for all including the King, but he has way more comforts than the others. While the King and his operations are in the center ring throughout this compact book, there are several sideshow plot arcs which illustrate the horror of an imprisoned society of men forced to compete for few resources.

Attempts are made to conduct educational classes which quickly fail. They also try to have religious services regularly. Most of the men are morally compromised to some degree after almost four years as prisoners. Most are fearful of the future, not sure if wives and children survived or waited for them as letters are almost never sent or received through the Japanese.

All in all, a suspenseful story on the top layer, but also a deeper layered exploration of human desperation and survival in a deformed, temporary, artificially civil society. However, the novel is still a quick interesting read. The author was clearly aware of the bad taste left behind when character and morality are tested by suffering, death and uncertainty.

4.5
japieprze ta książka była taka dobra (oprócz niektorych fragmentow) po prostu Wow

I thought his novel was just fantastic! (However, the entire saga of the King and the diamond was a lot of build up for a lot of nothing in the end, wasn't it?)