'King Rat' and the consequences of hard choices

Before he was the author of 1,000-page blockbuster novels about Asia, James Clavell was a screenwriter with a lot of time on his hands because of a strike.

That's how he became a novelist, when he turned his experiences in a World War II Japanese prison camp into his first novel, "King Rat." After nearly 15 years of saying nothing of his experiences - he found himself a prisoner again. His wife locked him in a room, he later recounted, promising to let him out only after he'd completed five pages of a novel. Clavell later admitted that much of this work was autobiographical, the character of Peter Marlowe serving as the author's stand-in. The 1963 novel was later made into a movie starring James Fox.

There's a reason Clavell, who also wrote the original film, "The Fly," and co-wrote "The Great Escape," sold millions of books - he was a very good writer. Even in this first work, he shows the polish and panache that distinguished him throughout his career, while still dealing with material that must have been personally harrowing to revisit. "If you live at the edge of death, you appreciate life," he said later. "It's the only way you can really appreciate life."

Clavell joined the Royal Artillery as a teenager, and was captured on Java. He was later sent to Changi Prison in Singapore, where he was subjected to some of the horrors depicted here.

Outside of slavery, it's hard to think of a more degrading experience than that recounted in "King Rat." The world within the novel is absolutely masculine. For the prisoner inside Changi, the war is over, and the tedium between action of the soldier is eaten up in the prisoner's tedium of inaction, or brutal labor. Men are deprived of healthcare, living on a barely subsistence diet. Cigarettes serve as currency, and black market bartering is cut-throat and emasculating. Each prisoner strips himself of clothing and dignity, floating in sweat and misery, convinced the future only holds more humiliation, and death. Each man is tormented by the knowledge that the world continues outside the camp, but what of friends and family, or any approaching relief?

At the center of the novel is "The King," an American corporal who is the master of illicit trades, commanding a small army of stooges who do his bidding. The King wears a clean uniform with  creased pants and clean socks, as he wanders through men with ill-fitting sarongs. He has his own store of food and demands tribute, keeping his own counsel. He does not survive by collaborating with the Japanese, but imposes his own order within the walls of the prison. With Marlowe's help, he hatches an elaborate scheme to supply the officers with rat meat through breeding vermin, and barters with guards and villagers with the guts of a burglar.

"The whole of Changi hated the King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In this twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews over bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man."

Marlowe is English, but Clavell only hints at the usual class distinctions among the British troops. Instead, each man is a human struggling to stay human. Marlowe is useful to the King, but he is also oblivious at first to what knowing him means. The King is never given an actual name, throughout the whole novel. And while there is something sinister about him, there is also something grand. The King survives on his wits and guile, not his intelligence. We aren't told what he did before the war, where he is from, or what his aims are. The ultimate goal of every other prisoner is to stay alive until the war is over. But the King wants more than survival - and he understands that here, in Changi, the rules are different. As Clavell writes, the world has been recreated here. It is a place of "beginning again."

Clavell gets a lot of mileage out of the image of the rat. They are scavengers, eating their own kind, living off filth and desperate for self-preservation. Changi has turned all the men into something a little better than rats, clinging to hope even when they think the Japanese will kill them all rather than surrender. Marlowe nearly dies in the camp, and it is only through the King's guile that he is given the medicine he needs to survive. "King Rat" is a different depiction than other prisoner of war stories, such as the portion of "Slaughterhouse Five" that deals with a German POW camp. The men of Changi are either cowed by the King's audacity, or they revile him, like Grey, the provost marshal of the camp. Grey later says the world would be a sorry place if everyone hid behind the excuse of the King - adapting to the circumstances of the camp. In other words, morality must hold true everywhere, or humanity perishes. If the camp changes who you are too radically, you will not be able to survive beyond it.

This is true for Sean, a prisoner who is recruited to play the female parts in plays staged inside the camp. Sean, we are told, was given the job because no one else would take it. But he soon began to adopt the mannerisms and trappings of a woman until he believed himself to be a woman. He feeds off the lust given by the prisoners at the sight of him, as they are altogether deprived of the
feminine form. When the war finally comes to an end, the men who previously had desired him are disgusted by the sight of "Betty," and he walks into the ocean to his doom. Marlowe is later left to ponder, "Is it wrong to adapt?"

In a curious way, Clavell contrasts these individual decisions with the drive to develop the atomic bombs which end the war. They have unleashed catastrophic destruction, killing hundreds of thousands of people and ushering in a new and awful kind of warfare. But to the men of Changi, there was no other choice. "But he knew, of a sudden, a great truth, and he blessed the brains that had invented the bombs. Only the bombs had saved Changi from oblivion. Oh yes, he told himself, whatever happens because of the bombs, I will bless the first two and the men who made them. Only they have given me back my life when there was truly no hope of life. And though the first two have consumed a multitude, by their very vastness they have saved the lives of countless hundred thousand others. Ours. And theirs. By the Lord God, this is the truth."

The coming of Allied troops and the end of the war is especially brutal to the King. Immediately, one of his henchman will no longer fetch his coffee. None of them want to see him. The rest of them say he is "dead." His presence seems to remind those who previously sought him out that something within them was perhaps fatally compromised in order to survive. When Marlowe attempts to console the King - indeed, to thank him for all he has done to keep them, and him, alive - the King will not be comforted. He is just a corporal again, stuck with stacks of worthless Japanese money. His exit from the camp is sudden and anticlimactic. He is reborn, as are those who bowed to him, and were bullied by him.

Clavell later said the lessons of Changi were repugnant to him until he transferred them to the pages of "King Rat." Writing it allowed him to see, from a distance, the distance he had bridged in remaining alive, in order to return to life.

War stories regularly refer to their settings as "hell on earth." To the Christian reader, the phrase is weak tea. Hell is hell, and the worst parts of existence all eventually come to an end. We crave the freedom of resurrection, sometimes not knowing that it takes a great deal of pain to shake off what we were before. Stuck here on a planet of beings little better than rats, we cling to hope and morality to preserve ourselves, abandoning either when the mood suits us, hoping others will embrace them if it means our lives.

There is little logic among corruption, save surviving. We forge ourselves with each decision, hoping we do not harden into something corrupted, or corrupting. Pardons extended from Heaven, however well-disguised or obvious, uplift as they humble, while at the same time we go on resenting the same hand that feeds us. We cry out for a King until he makes demands on us, but kings often distinguish themselves only through acts of mercy.

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