The Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle
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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.

Animal Farm by George Orwell
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Animal Farm (which, after 1984, is probably Orwell’s best know work) is an allegory critical of communism.

Ok, I lie.

Just a little?

Communism in its simplest form is both the classless and stateless ownership of the means of production. At the time Orwell was writing Animal Farm (1943-1944) Russia under Stalin was arguably far from what someone like Marx had envisioned. The fundamental problem with a classless system that I see is that someone has to make decisions about what needs to be done. That, and greed. Greed always creeps in. So if it’s not about communism then what is it critical of? Orwell was strongly critical of Stalinism led by (you guessed it) Stalin, the leader of Russia at the time. Orwell believed that Stalinism was a corruption of the socialist ideals that Marx originally had in mind. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of political embarrassment for the West when it was first published in 1945. At the time Russia was an ally of the West, having just defeated the Germans in Berlin a few months before.

Animal Farm is set on a farm with your typical range of animals and a farmer, the dreaded (by the animals) Mr Jones. One night one of the aging animals incites the animals to take action against their human suppressors. An uprising occurs not too soon after his death and soon the animals have the farm to themselves and free to live in the society they have always dreamed of.

At first, everything goes swimmingly. The power vacuum does start to prove to be too great however, and as I alluded to earlier, when you have a group of people trying to achieve something, someone always ends up leading. We see this familiar trend emerge soon enough and the ‘slippery slope‘ thoughts will start creeping in to most readers minds.

What is charming about this book as a criticism is the narrator is completely objective and doesn’t pass judgement about any of the occurrences on the farm. It would be way too easy to slant this way towards Orwell’s argument but he lets the reader take away from it only as much as they want to. If you had no idea that communism/Stalinism even existed then you may just see the unfolding events as sad or scary. I would like to think though that most people would have a vague idea about the circumstances surrounding the book (as if the references to “Comrade” wouldn’t be enough).

If you read this book make sure you have a look at Wikipedia to see the correlation between characters in the book and figures of the era. See how many you can fit together before you look. My opinion of the book sky-rocketed when I found out who all the characters were meant to represent (I had many “ohhhhhhhhhh………I get it now” moments).

On The Beach by Nevil Shute
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“That’s so depressing,” my sister remarked when she saw I was reading this. Gee thanks, I thought. On the Beach is set in Melbourne in the 60s amongst a post-World War III environment of impending nuclear doom. Due to no fault of Australia, cobalt-based bombs have wiped out everywhere north of Australia and the cloud of destruction is slowly but surely drifting south.

We follow the lives of five people: the captain of an American nuclear submarine, an Australian navy officer posted to the submarine, his wife, their alcoholic friend and a CSIRO scientific officer also posted on the submarine. The seagoing members in the book are sent on journeys to work out how far the radiation is spreading and to look for signs of life up north.

What surprised me was the calm resignation that pretty much all the characters exhibit, despite knowing that all life is sure to end in just a few months time. They go on with planning for the future years down the track (planting gardens, ploughing fields, etc.) which at first I thought was crazy but then it dawned on me: even if you knew when you were going to die, keeping busy is the only thing that would prevent you from curling up in the corner in the foetal position.

The other linked concept here is the difference between knowing when you’re going to die and it being a surprise. All the characters have an approximate date for Melbourne’s demise and its interesting to see the way the community as a whole handles the situation.

So overall, I didn’t find it depressing (a little bit sad, yes). The dignity with which the characters face their inevitable doom was inspiring. A good classic Australian (I think Shute was British but we’ll claim it anyway) book.