A Town Like Alice: (Vintage Classics Shute Series)

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Jean is not a revolutionary figure. She doesn’t end segregation in Willstown. However, she is adamant that if she can’t serve the aboriginal people in her ice cream parlors and shops, then she will have to build an adjacent shop for them. “We can’t leave them out,” she says, and it’s implied that she takes some flak for it. In her eagerness for me tor me to read it, my grandmother actually sent me two copies of the book. With one of them she included this article about Jane Austen – not sure what the relation was.

Themes include a woman’s place in society, entrepreneurship, and renewal of life after war. The attitudes of the period are in evidence in racial issues and gender roles; however, the author is attempting to show that these views are false. For example, Jean, being a woman, is assumed to be incompetent with money, but she proves to be an astute businesswoman. She also figures out a way to improve the lives of the women of the Malayan village that helped her group during the war. The story’s narrator is the elderly solicitor in charge of the trust fund. He becomes an important element of the story and a character you’re going to like! No more clues will I give here. However, war has a way of causing the least favored bequests in wills to often be made. In this case World War Two left McFadden's estate to his least favored heir. It was up to Strachan to sort things out and carry out his client's last wishes. He loosely based Joe on Herbert James “Ringer” Edwards, an Australian soldier in Malaysia who was tortured on the Burma Railway and narrowly escaped execution. Of course, the portrayal of aboriginal people and other people of non-white extraction is a reflection of the racism of the time that the book was written, and one of the reasons i didn't like this book better. But there was something else that irked me: in the first part of the story, part of the message seemed to have been that the main character learned about how silly attitudes of cultural superiority are. In the second part of the book, this is somewhat forgotten or set aside. This may have been because the story was not told from Jean's perspective entirely, but still it felt like an odd break in the story.

by Nevil Shute

I did receive A Town like Alice from a dear (old) colleague during my farewell drink. I had quit my job quite suddenly. A job I absolutely loved and with a heavy heart I had handed over my resignation letter. But why? For love…. Jean's story gradually unfolds as she tells of the terrible ordeal she suffered through on a death march in Malaya , at the hands of the Japanese during WW II . It is then that we discover that she has guts, heart and smarts . A Town Like Alice". 20 February 1997. p.108. Archived from the original on 4 February 2019 . Retrieved 3 February 2019– via BBC Genome.

The story is told by an English solicitor who is executor of a will which causes him to search for a woman who is the only surviving party named in the will. He finds her eventually, and she tells him her story of how she’d been captured by the Japanese during the war along with more than thirty other women in Malaya. Along the way, she meets an Australian and of course, they fall in love, but there is no time for a relationship to develop as they only see each other a few times.

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I will admit at this juncture that I am unabashedly a romantic. Nevil Shute wrote a story which enchanted me with its charm, courage, and passion that was truly unbridled only after a wedding ring was slipped onto a finger, and a marriage meant to last a lifetime. Old fashioned, you say? inevitably homosexuals can't operate heavy machinery (assuming any such persons exist outside of medical speculation - which is obviously highly unlikely especially in Australia), I've owned a copy of A Town Like Alice for more than ten years now, and I've always stopped short of reaching for it because... it just didn't sound that interesting to me. On the whole, I'm not a huge fan of war books, especially those set within the conflict itself. But I made a mistake waiting to read this one. I've been missing out. A Town Like Alice (1980) – David Stevens – Synopsis, Characteristics, Moods, Themes and Related". AllMovie. Archived from the original on 4 February 2019 . Retrieved 3 February 2019. There is nothing in this book to dislike unless you simply refuse to believe in the possibility of happy endings. They do happen, you know.