Why a Booktrail?
1900s: The blurb says it all really – a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War Two to the rugged Australian outback’. A journey in all senses of the word.
A Town like Alice
What you need to know before your trail
Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese along with many other women and children. They are forced on a seven month death march through the jungle and into a nightmare.
Many years later and Jean returns to England but when she receives an rather unexpected inheritance, she returns to Malaya and goes to see the villagers who return her life. Then she sets off for Australia where she also goes to meet someone from her past. someone who shares the wartime secrets she does. There’s something she has to do there and it won’t be easy.
Travel Guide
Jean Paget, a Scottish woman, raised by her parents in Malay and who returns there as an adult is a unique character through which to see what is now Malaysia at the time when the Japanese invaded the island during ww2.
The scenes of her march and of the captivity are hard to read but feel so realistic and raw. the brutal honesty of the book rings true as some of the women and children die from such forced exertion. The humanity of these women never leaves them though and this contrasts so sharply with the actions of the captors that it makes it all the more heartbreaking and poignant.
A fellow POW called Joe Harman tells of his hometown – near Alice Springs – and so the two become friends. He is the reason she goes to Australia years later. The fictional “Willstown” is apparently based on Burketown and Normanton in Queensland as this is where Shute visited once.
The actual events in the novel are real although Shute writes in the book that the forced march during WW2 took place in Sumatra and not Malaya and the women in the group were Dutch and not British.
Jean Paget was based on someone Shute met during a trip to Sumatra in the late 1940s where he learned of the horrific station there and of how a real life veteran of the time was crucified by Japanese near the Burma railway as appears in the novel since this form of punishment (Haritsuke) was used by the Japanese during the war.
Where Next?
