A Bonza Town

I first heard of Nevil Shute’s A Town like Alice (1950) when I was a schoolboy, and long before I read it I was fascinated by the title. How, I wondered, could a town possibly be like a person? When I eventually discovered that ‘Alice’ was short for Alice Springs, a remote settlement in the Australian Outback, I was still baffled – for from what I knew of the plot, the novel’s main focus was wartime Malaya. And though I have now read it half a dozen times, and come to love its combination of far-flung romance, desperate endurance and old-fashioned stoicism, there remains a conundrum at the heart of it which continues to tantalize me, like a stubborn morsel of crabmeat wedged in the corner of a claw.

The dust-jacket of my second edition proclaims Shute’s gifts as a ‘storyteller’ – which usually implies ‘not much of a stylist’. It’s true that he set little store by poetic description, but one thing he did understand was tone, and perhaps his most inspired decision in writing A Town like Alice was his choice of narrator: a dry old stick of a solicitor called Noel Strachan. A tale as dramatic as this, Shute’s instinct must have told him, requires no flights of fancy or embellishment. Strachan begins with a slow, pedantic account of how he came to draw up the will of a Scottish invalid called Douglas Macfadden. On Macfadden’s death in 1948, Strachan has the task of tracking down the heir to his substantial estate, who proves to be a 27-year-old typist living in Ealing. Jean Paget is good-looking and level-headed, but apparently unremarkable; she will not be drawn on her wartime experiences, beyond saying that she spent three years as ‘a sort of prisoner-of war’ in Malaya, where she grew up. Strachan, by now a widower in his early seventies, is attracted to her – though he won’t admit it – and starts taking her to the opera and exhibitions. When she finally tells him her story, she begins in typical Shute-ian style – not with a fanfare, but with a simple remark that gives no hint of the extraordinary revelations to come: ‘I want to go back to Malaya, Mr Strachan. To build a well.’ The scene now shifts to the Far East in 1941. Jean is in a party of 32 British women and children captured by the Japanese near Kuala Lumpur; but because no one wants to take responsibility for them, and no transport is available, they are marched from pillar to post across the country without a fixed destination. Exhaustion and illness take their toll; after five months only half the group are left alive. A glimmer of hope appears when the women meet two Australian POWs who are driving trucks for the Japanese. One, Joe Harman, offers to steal food and medicine for them, and he and Jean become close as he tells her of his life on a cattle station near Alice Springs (‘a bonza town’); but Joe overreaches himself when he steals five cockerels belonging to the local Japanese commander. Again, Shute’s low-key narrative is like a Stealth bomber delivering its devastating payload:

Darkness was closing down in my London sitting-room, the early darkness of a stormy afternoon. The rain still beat upon the window. The girl sat staring into the fire, immersed in her sad memories. ‘They crucified him,’ she said quietly. ‘They took us all down to Kuantan, and they nailed his hands to a tree, and beat him to death. They kept us there, and made us look on while they did it.’

‘My dear,’ I said. ‘I am so very sorry.’

The dominant theme of A Town like Alice is the gulf between different cultures, and the importance of bridging it. Jean and her companions first discover the brutality of their captors when the imperious Mrs Horsfall tells an officer that Englishwomen do not sleep on the floor in the Japanese manner, ‘like animals’:

His eyes hardened; he motioned to the sentries, who gripped her by each arm. Then he hit her four stinging blows upon the face with the flat of his hand. ‘Very bad thoughts,’ he said, and turned upon his heel, and left them.

Conversely, it is Jean’s ability not only to communicate with Malays in their own language, but to adopt their lifestyle and see things from their point of view – ‘going native’, as some of her companions would have it – which proves the prisoners’ salvation. When their guard dies of fever in an isolated village, she persuades its inhabitants to let them stay there for the duration of the war, earning their keep by working in the paddy fields; her respectful exchanges with the venerable headman are among the most touching passages in the book. Returning to build a well for the villagers is her way of saying thank you, and it brings an unimagined reward: the discovery that – by a classic twist best not revealed here – Joe Harman is still alive. It is what happens next that makes the book so problematic. Shute has created a scenario in which Jean could easily fly on to Australia, find Joe, marry him and bring the story to a swift conclusion. Instead, he has Joe win the lottery and arrive in London in search of Jean just as she is heading for his new home in Queensland. As a result, she has several months to discover Australia while waiting for him to catch up with her; by the time he does, she has begun to realize that if they are to make a go of things, his flyblown local town must be transformed into a place where people want to live – a town like Alice. Because Shute is a master of narrative, he manages to keep you turning the pages; but even with the air rescue of an injured ‘poddy-dodger’ (cattle rustler), there is never a chance that Jean’s Australian adventures will be as gripping as what has gone before. The two halves of the narrative scarcely seem to belong to the same book. So why didn’t he content himself with his first, extraordinary story? My 1950 dust-jacket sheds some light on the matter. The publisher’s blurb mentions Malaya only in passing; instead, it describes in detail a trip Shute made to Australia in 1958, collecting ‘a mass of interesting facts’ for his novel. So taken was he by the country that he emigrated there shortly afterwards. The charge against him, then, is this: that his obsession with his adopted home led him to compromise a brilliant plot by bolting on what is fundamentally a travelogue. The makers of the 1956 film version clearly took this view, because they reduced the Australian episodes to a five-minute afterthought. But to watch the movie is to make a strange discovery: the story doesn’t work without them – and establishing why is like trying to split a log with a stubborn, fibrous knot at the heart of it. Perhaps this flawed masterpiece can only be understood as a product of its time. In a world still recovering from war, Shute and his readers knew that happy endings were hard to come by, and that relationships needed strong foundations to survive. What people craved above all was hope, and to have Jean and Joe prepare for life together by building a new community in a young country must have seemed an inspired reflection of the Zeitgeist. But what makes A Town like Alice a classic is its abundance of timeless themes: an odyssey, thwarted lovers, triumph over adversity, rags to riches, a stranger in town, a dead man returned to life. To this list should be added one more: the love triangle. For the novel has a third plot line, just as essential as its Malayan and Australian ones, which makes the whole even harder to disentangle – Noel Strachan’s unrequited love for Jean. Another writer might have contented himself with a love affair between two young people separated by war and half the world. Shute, however, has the masterly perception that there is as much emotion – if not more – to be wrung from the hopeless, sublimated passion of an elderly widower. The book’s second half, whatever its defects, gives him the chance to develop this strand – first by making Strachan choose between helping or sabotaging Jean’s search for Joe, and secondly by having the old man experience Australia for himself. And last but not least, it allows Shute to end the novel on a note of extraordinary pathos, as this most buttoned-up of lawyers finally admits to his own heartbreak:

I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf Country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Anthony Gardner 2015