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At night you dreamed. Dreamed about food and women. Your woman. And soon you would enjoy the dreaming more than the waking, and if you were careless you would dream while awake, and the days would run into nights and the night into day. Then there was only death. Smooth. Gentle. It was easy to die. Agony to live. Except for the King. He had no agony.
In my never-ending quest to find the most possible badass public transportation reading, James Clavell ranks very high. Don't get me wrong, reading on the bus is half posturing, so Clavell has an interesting coefficient of book thickness, historical value and straight out alpha male fisticuffs value. He's also known, but not that known. You have to make the effort of seeking him out, unlike Chuck Palahniuk for example. KING RAT was my first Clavell novel and it was a fantastic experience, both in public transportation posturing and in transcendent reading. It's the kind of novel Ernest Hemingway himself would've written, if he had been hired by a Men's Aventure Magazine, had he lived through the sixties.
Who would you become if the rules of society suddenly crumble and you had the opportunity to form new ones?
It's the main philosophical quandary James Clavell is playing with, through the confrontation of the King and Grey, in KING RAT. Grey is the kind of man who always succeeded through his understanding of rules and structures, and the King is the kind of man who always was limited because of systemized thinking. Their personality are violently clashing because Grey is still clinging to an order that doesn't exist anymore within the walls of Changi. The dynamic microcosm James Clavell created within the walls of his prison keeps evolving with the development of WWII. The guys are getting at each other's throat because the possibility of recuperating their old life comes looming, and everyone is trying to do what's right and to keep everyone alive. KING RAT is a estament to the resilience of men, caught in a hopeless place.
Perhaps the coolest (and most amusing) aspect of KING RAT is how ridiculously Hemingwayesque it is. I'm aware it's a first novel and that James Clavell probably evolved afterwards, but holy shit. It alternates between worship and parody. There are a lot of men smoking cigarettes and stoically gazing into the eyes of death itself. I enjoyed it because I love Ernest Hemingway, I believe in his philosophy of writing and I thought it gave the novel a jagged ''pulp'' edge, but it might rub some people the wrong way because there is nothing subtle about James Clavell's Hemingway worship. It's supercharged with Hemingwayism. The best metaphor I can give you to examplify what I mean is that comparing Clavell's KING RAT and Hemingway's writing would be like comparing a drag queen and a young woman. Some might find that James Clavell writes grotesque Hemingwayesque overakills, I thought it was fun.
The novels that can successfully juxtapose philosophical questioning and ''pulp'' overkill. I loved KING RAT because it's a novel that understands perfectly what it is and embraced its purpose with an infectious energy. Also, it almost convinced me that James Clavell had a shrine to Ernest Hemingway inside his living room. So if you're looking for badass public transportation reading, not only James Clavell will make you look like a G, but you're also going to have a great time with his novel KING RAT. I'm not an expert on war literature, but I have to say it was one of my favourite war novels of all-time due to its dynamic and clever philosophical approach and its unapologetic worshipping of one of the greatest authors of all time. It's not going to be everybody's cup of tea, but I thought it was really cool.