The Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle
(Buy it at Amazon)

This book really does disappoint. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a good 50 years old now but seeing as I actually liked On the Beach and Animal Farm which are similar in age I’m starting to think that maybe age is not the barrier here.

But I’m probably too far ahead of myself already.

The Bridge over the River Kwai is about the building of…well…a bridge over the River Kwai during the Second World War by British prisoners-of-war. A second thread in the book covers a British mission to destroy the very same bridge that their compatriots are building. Sounds promising, right? Well I thought so, but it doesn’t deliver – not by a long shot.

The first problem is the, for want of a better word, ‘Britishness’ of it (which is slightly strange considering it was written by a Frenchie) the strong, silent stiff upper lip kind of Britishness engulfs every character. The cold and calculating figures that fill the book mean that its hard to develop sympathy for anyone (maybe with an exception in Clipton, the doctor, but his part is minimal towards the latter stages of the book and I never really got a sense as to what he was feeling).

The 1967 edition I read promised me “Pierre Boulle’s best-seller about the horrors of life in a Japanese P.O.W. camp”. The horrors (of which I’m sure there were plenty in the real P.O.W. camps) are glossed over throughout the book. After some initial hardship the construction of the bridge proceeds smoothly without Boulle even batting an eyelid. This requires a suspension of disbelief that I just couldn’t muster.

Most of the second half of the book revolves around the planning of the attack on the bridge. Note that I say the planning because that’s pretty much what it is – planning. The tediousness of the planning of the attack will most probably put you to sleep. Most readers will be satisfied when the author describes how much of a perfection artist a certain character but Boulle decides to really ram it home by making the book tedious to read by taking us step by step through every single planning decision. The result of this is that the last 10 or 15 pages contain more action than the preceding 175. In these final 15 pages Boulle doesn’t even seize on the opportunity to deliver what he has built up over the whole book, instead deciding to tell the pivotal moment in the book after the fact.

Just staggering.

Leave this one alone.