"Shame and the Captives," by Thomas Keneally

      Well, you can expect--and you get--a well-crafted novel by Keneally. As with Schindler's List, or a number of his many other books, he obviously does a lot of research. In this novel, his research has focussed on the Japanese martial spirit and the shame felt by Japanese prisoners of war in Australia. And the background--though he says this is not a roman-a-clef--is the breakout of Japanese prisoners from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1944. There were 1,100 odd Japanese prisoners in a camp in a rural area, and there were also a large number of Italians in separate camp.

     The Japanese prisoners stormed the wire fences, throwing blankets over them to protect themselves (to a minor extent) from the barbs on the wire. Many who did not climb the fence with the others committed suicide. The Australian guards opened fire with a machine gun and before the situation had been brought under control and the last escapees captured, 231 Japanese and four Australian soldiers were dead. A total of 359 escaped. Many of the escapees committed suicide, often asking others to kill them.Within 10 days all escapees left alive had been recaptured: none had committed any acts of violence against Australian civilians.

    A machine gunner was overwhelmed and killed by escaping prisoners, but he managed to throw away a crucial piece of the gun's mechanism and thus rendered the gun useless for the escaping prisoners: he was awarded a posthumous medal for bravery. This incident forms part of the novel.

    While the pricipal focus is on the mentality and the motivations of the Japanese prisoners--focussing on three or four in particular--there are also sub-plots, one dealing with the marital problems of the camp commander, and the other with an Australian girl's affair with an Italian prisoner of war who is working on her father-in-law's farm: her husband is a POW in Austria.

    An interesting novel, although I found the sub-plots rather tedious, especially the marital problems of the camp commander. I liked Keneally's disclaimer that he is writing about real characters: "Fiction has always tried to tell the truth by telling lies."