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Nevil Shute | 368 pages | 23 Apr 2015 | Vintage Publishing | 9781784870027 | English | London, United Kingdom A Town Like Alice Summary | SuperSummary

Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman, becomes romantically interested in a fellow prisoner of World War II in Malayaand after liberation emigrates to Australia to be with him, where she attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community—to turn it into "a town like Alice" i. Alice Springs. In post-World War II London, Jean Paget, a secretary in a leather goods factory, is informed by solicitor Noel Strachan that she has inherited A Town Like Alice considerable sum of money from an A Town Like Alice she never knew. But the solicitor is now A Town Like Alice trustee and she only has the use of the income until she inherits absolutely, at the age of thirty-five, several years in the future. In the firm's interest, but increasingly with personal interest, Strachan acts as her guide and advisor. Jean decides that her priority is to build a well in a Malayan village. The second part of the story flashes back to Jean's experiences during the war, when she was working in Malaya at the time the Japanese invaded and was taken prisoner A Town Like Alice with a group of A Town Like Alice and children. As she speaks Malay fluently, Jean takes a leading role in the group of prisoners. The Japanese refuse all responsibility for the group and march A Town Like Alice from one village to another. Many of them, not used to physical hardship, die. Jean meets an Australian soldier, Sergeant Joe Harman, also a prisoner, who is driving a lorry for the Japanese and they strike up A Town Like Alice friendship. He steals food and medicines to help them. Jean is carrying a toddler, whose mother has died, and this leads Harman to believe that she is married; to avoid complications, Jean does not correct this assumption. On one occasion, Harman steals five chickens from the local Japanese commander. The thefts are investigated and Harman takes the blame to save Jean and the rest of the group. He is beaten, crucified, A Town Like Alice left to die by the Japanese soldiers. The women are marched away, believing that he is dead. When their sole Japanese guard dies, the women become part of a Malayan village community. They live and work there for three years, until the war ends and they are repatriated. Now a wealthy woman at least on paperJean decides she wants to build a well for the village so that the women will not have to walk so far to collect water: "A gift by women, for women". Strachan arranges for her to travel to Malaya, where she goes back to the village and persuades the headman to allow her to build the well. While it is being built, she discovers that, by a strange chance, Joe Harman survived his punishment and returned to Australia. She decides to travel on to Australia to find him. On her travels, she visits the town of Alice Springswhere Joe lived before the war, and is much impressed with the quality of life there. She A Town Like Alice travels to the fictional primitive town of Willstown in the Queensland outbackwhere Joe has become manager of a cattle station. She soon discovers that the quality of life in "Alice" is an anomaly, and life for a woman in the outback is elsewhere very rugged. Willstown is described as "a fair cow". Meanwhile, Joe has met a pilot who helped repatriate the women, from whom he learns that Jean survived the war and that she was never married. He travels to London to find her, using money won in the Golden Casket lottery. He finds his way to Strachan's office, but is told that she has gone travelling in the Far East. Disappointed, he gets drunk and is arrested, but is bailed out by Strachan. Without revealing Jean's actual whereabouts, Strachan persuades Joe to return home by ship and intimates that he may well receive a great surprise there. While staying in Willstown, awaiting Joe's return, Jean learns that most young girls have to leave the town to find work in the bigger cities. Having worked with a A Town Like Alice in Britain that produced crocodile-leather luxury goods, she gets the idea of founding a local workshop to make shoes from the skins of crocodiles hunted in the outback. With the help of Joe and of Noel Strachan, who releases money from her inheritance, she starts the workshop, followed by a string of other businesses; an ice-cream parlour, a public swimming pool and shops. The third part of the book shows how Jean's entrepreneurship gives a decisive economic impact to develop Willstown into "a town like Alice"; also Jean's help in rescuing an injured stockman, which breaks down many local barriers. The story closes a few years later, with an aged Noel Strachan visiting Willstown to see what has been done with the money he has given Jean to invest. He reveals that the money which Jean inherited was originally made in an Australian gold rush, and he is satisfied to see the money returning to the site of its making. Jean and Joe name their second son Noel, and ask Strachan to be his godfather. They invite Noel Strachan to make his home with them in Australia, but he declines the invitation, returns to Britain and the novel closes. In a note to the text, Shute wrote that a forced march of women by the Japanese did indeed take place during World War II, but the women in question were Dutch, not British as in the novel, and the march was in Sumatra, not Malaya. Geysel-Vonckwhom Shute met while visiting Sumatra in However, the Foundation states that this was a misunderstanding, and that the women were merely transported from prison camp to prison camp by the Japanese. This was possibly the luckiest misunderstanding of his life He had later escaped execution a second time, when his " last meal " of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Crucifixion or Haritsuke was a form of punishment or torture that the Japanese sometimes used against prisoners during the war. The fictional "Willstown" is reportedly based on and Normanton in Queensland, which Shute visited in Their inclusion by the author was likely unintentional, and serve simply to enhance that accuracy of the picture his words are painting of what daily life included, both in London in England and in the cities, towns and outback of Australia. Sexism appears in the opening pages of the book, as solicitor Noel Strachan interacts with Jean's uncle and eventual benefactor, James McFadden. When asked if A Town Like Alice, having become the sole beneficiary of his estate, should receive her inheritance upon turning 21, he replies "I think that would be most A Town Like Alice, Mr. Strachan, if I may say so. No Lassie would be fit to administer her own estate when she was twenty-one. A lassie of that age is at the mercy of her sex. I would want the trust to continue for much longer than that. Till she was forty, at the very least". Strachan eventually convinces McFadden to reduce this requirement to age 35, it is interesting [ according to whom? As a single woman traveling on her own through the A Town Like Alice outback, A Town Like Alice is often the subject of sexists remarks, including the cross examination by hotel proprietor Mrs. Connor when Jean asked to book a room: 'Well, I don't know, I'm sure. You traveling alone? The inclusion of racism in the narrative is evident in the casual dialogue A Town Like Alice was part of the everyday experience at that time, particularly among the white population in Australia when referring to the Australian Aborigines. Shortly A Town Like Alice meeting Joe Harman, Jean listens to him describing his pre-war life as a "ringer" in Queensland: "Nine boongs we had. That's all. His pet name for Jean, the woman he loves, is "Mrs Boong"; hardly an expression of contempt from Joe's perspective, as articulated by the author Nevil Shute. Shute does not hesitate to place the Aboriginal characters in the book in the context of their second place status in Australian society. In Chapter 5, Jean asks why a white rancher would ever marry an Aborigine woman. In Chapter 8, Jean ponders: "what do I do if a boong A Town Like Alice comes into" her ice cream shop? The solution was to create a separate shop for the Aborigines. Race is a constant in the novel. When there is a discussion about workers it is always discussed by race, using the common slang of the time to describe the "ringers" and the Aborigines. With the end of the Pacific war against Imperial Japan in Augustand the repatriation of tens of thousands of prisoners of war taken by the Japanese armed forces, the world was learning first hand of the horrific details of the barbaric and inhuman treatment that these prisoners of war had endured in the hands of their captors. The world also learned of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners who had been worked to death as slaves of the Japanese, or executed by by them as punishment for any A Town Like Alice all infractions, however slight. After five years of brutal warfare, initiated by Japanese imperialism and expansionary policy in the Pacific, it is not at all surprising that the Japanese people were held in contempt by the victorious allies. Referring to Japanese soldiers, in a text written three years after the end of World War 2, as "Japs" or "Nips" was simply an accurate portrayal of how the general public perceived the Japanese. In spite of this common held view, the narrative includes a very different picture of the behaviour of the individual Japanese soldier in the story of the women's Japanese guards during their wandering across Malaya. The humiliation of their Sergeant "Gunso" guard, and his eventual sickness and death, is treated with great empathy and respect. While his narrative clearly condemns the brutal actions of the nation and its military leaders and officers, Nevil Shute was prepared to find compensating humanity in some of the individuals within this very different valued society. The novel was adapted to film in as A Town Like Alice. It won a Sony Award in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see A Town Like Alice disambiguation. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made A Town Like Alice adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. October Learn how and when to remove this template message. This section includes A Town Like Alice list of referencesrelated reading or external linksbut its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help to improve this section by introducing more precise citations. January Learn how and when to remove this template message. Novels portal. A Town Like Alice September ed. Great Britain: William Heinemann Ltd. A Town Like Alice. Books by Nevil Shute. 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From " Veronica Mars " to Rebecca take a look back at the career of Armie Hammer on and off the screen. See A Town Like Alice full gallery. Title: A Town Like Alice Inthe advancing Japanese army captures a lot of British territory very quickly. The men are sent off to labor camps, but they have no plan on what to do with the women and children of the British. A group is sent on a forced march from place to place searching for a Women's Camp. Told from the point of view of one of the women, she meets an Australian soldier who sneaks food for them from his labor camp. After the war, she goes to Australia to see the town he was from and hopefully reunite with the soldier. They suffer under the hands A Town Like Alice the Japanese not as prisoners, quite, but as refugees caught between captors. Having nowhere to go and no one to protect them, they end up walking and walking, through jungle and no-man's land, past actual POW camps and through native villages, until gradually they start to die from the hardship. Mixed into this really vivid and heartbreaking drama is a love affair between a passing Australian soldier and one of the women. The man is a prisoner of the Japanese who seems to have some freedom because he can fix things for them, and he crosses paths with the women a few times over the years. Years, yes. The movie moves quickly through a long period of war. This is the real war for most people, the occupation by the Japanese and their arrogance, and the patience and impotence of ordinary people. It is told with alarming frankness. I mean, it's still a movie from the s, not a documentary, but the plainness of the actors, the relatively low budget of the film, and the location shooting all make for a convincing final product. It's amazing, at times, and heartwarming as much as heartwrenching. There is even the one terribly good Japanese soldier trapped by the same bigger circumstance of a war that was not his doing. The one known actor here is Peter Finch, who is marvelous, even though his role is limited. He is meant to be a bright spot in the life of this woman, and he is wonderfully bright and cheerful a true Aussie stereotype that we all love. The book that inspired the movie is widely regarded to this day, and was written by Nevil Shute, who heard about a group of Dutch not English women shuttled about by the Japanese in Dutch Malaysia during the war. It turns out that they were not usually made to walk, but Shute's misunderstanding of the story led to the main drama of the book and later movie. The crucifixion of prisoners by Japanese soldiers shown in the movie is substantiated, however, and it's a gruesome final turn of events for the plot. There are few movies of this post-war period A Town Like Alice really deal with ordinary suffering by ordinary people in Asia during the war the suffering of civilians in Europe or Britain is fully shown, by A Town Like Alice. This A Town Like Alice does it well, very well. A wonderful surprise. Looking for something to watch? Choose an adventure below and discover your next favorite movie or TV show. Visit our What to Watch page. Sign In. Keep track of everything you A Town Like Alice tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Release Dates. Official Sites. Company Credits. Technical Specs. Plot Summary. Plot Keywords. Parents Guide. External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. A newly wealthy English woman returns to Malaya to build a well for the villagers who helped her during war. Thinking back, she recalls the A Town Like Alice man who made a great sacrifice to aid her and her fellow prisoners of war. Director: Jack Lee. Writers: Nevil Shute novelW. Available on Amazon. Added to Watchlist. The Evolution of Armie Hammer. Best Picture CMR Favorites. W Films. Use the HTML A Town Like Alice. You A Town Like Alice be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. User Polls The greatest A Town Like Alice mini-series, short run tv series Another 5 nominations. Jean Paget Peter Finch Joe Harman Kenji Takaki Captain Sugaya Jean Anderson Miss Horsefall Marie Lohr Dudley Frost Maureen Swanson Ellen Renee Houston Ebbey Nora Nicholson Frith Eileen Moore Holland John Fabian Holland Vincent Ball Ben Tim Turner British Sergeant Vu Ngoc Tuan Captain Yanata Munesato Yamada Edit Storyline Inthe advancing Japanese army captures a lot of British territory very quickly. Edit Did You Know? After the war it operated with Trans Australia Airlines from to and was named "Grey" as seen on the door when Joe deplanes. After further service with airlines in New Guinea, Taiwan and Laos, it was reportedly scrapped in Goofs When the women are running excitedly to the bath, one of them slips on the wet floor and A Town Like Alice over and has to be pulled back up onto her feet by Renee Houston. Australian Driver : That's new - most people wanna get out of it! Crazy Credits Opening credits prologue: The characters in this story are fictitious. The story itself however is based upon true fact. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report this. Add the first question. Edit Details Country: UK. Language: English Japanese. Runtime: min. Color: Black and White. Edit page. October Streaming Picks. Back to A Town Like Alice Picks. Clear your history. A Town Like Alice (film) - Wikipedia

Looking for a movie the entire family can enjoy? Check out our picks for family friendly movies movies that transcend all ages. For even more, visit our Family Entertainment Guide. See the full list. Title: A Town Like Alice Set against the brutal chaos of World War II, a love story begins that will take two lovers through a living nightmare of captivity, across three continents and two decades. From the steamy jungles of Malaya to the dusty and desolate outback of Australia. Meeting in Malaya - she an attractive young English captive A Town Like Alice he a cheerful Australian POW tortured for a simple act of kindness. Separated first by their captors then by the distance of passing years, the two are finally reunited in the rugged outback of Australia-to face a challenge every bit as demanding as their wartime trials. I remember watching this series avidly and being so disappointed when it came to an end. Over the years since then, I have tried to find out if I could obtain a copy of it on either video or d. However, I was delighted to find this website with details of it, only to be disappointed again at the point of purchase, that the videos available will not play on English recorders! This production was so wonderful, A Town Like Alice absolutely accurate with Nevil Shute's novel, taking the storyline through after A Town Like Alice end of the war, with Joe and Jean's subsequent life together - absolutely marvellous - and I just wish I were able to see it again, as since it's original screening, there have been no repeats of it on British television. Looking for some great streaming picks? Check out some of the IMDb editors' favorites movies and shows to round out your Watchlist. Visit our What to Watch page. Sign In. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Release Dates. Official Sites. Company Credits. Technical Specs. A Town Like Alice List. Plot Summary. Plot Keywords. Parents Guide. External Sites. User Reviews. User Ratings. External Reviews. Metacritic Reviews. Photo Gallery. Trailers and Videos. Crazy Credits. Alternate Versions. Rate This. Episode Guide. From the steamy Added to Watchlist. Watched: watch again. TV 8 out of Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. User Polls The greatest Australian mini-series, short run tv series Episodes Seasons. Nominated for 1 Primetime Emmy. Another 8 wins. Edit Cast Series cast summary: Helen A Town Like Alice Jean Paget 3 episodes, Bryan Brown Joe Harman 3 episodes, A Town Like Alice Jackson Noel Strachan 3 episodes, Dorothy Alison Frith 3 episodes, Yuki Shimoda Sergeant Mifune 3 episodes, Anna Volska Derek Wilson-Hayes 3 episodes, Jennifer West Horsefall 3 episodes, Pat Evison Collard 3 episodes, Mandy Boocock Marlene A Town Like Alice 3 episodes, Rebecca Marshall Rita Collard 3 episodes, Debbie Baile Audrey Forbes 3 episodes, Cecily Polson Eileen Holland 3 episodes, Melissa Crawford Robyn Holland 3 episodes, John Allen Bill Holland 3 episodes, Sean Hinton Freddie Holland 3 episodes, Lucy Bell Jane Holland 3 episodes, Crispian Ashby Jonnie Horsefall 3 episodes, John Howard Donald Paget 3 episodes, Patrick Dickson Tommy Smythe 3 episodes, Kenneth Brown Ben Leggatt 3 episodes, Richard Narita Captain Sugamo 3 episodes, Hatsuo Uda Captain Koniata 3 episodes, Lim Beng Choon Major Nemu 3 episodes, Akio Fukuwa Japanese Lieutenant 3 episodes, Zain Ariff Mat Amin 3 episodes, Zainal Aziz Suleiman 3 A Town Like Alice, Antony Croser James McFadden 3 episodes, John Lee Lester 'Les' Robinson 3 episodes, Joan Lord Miss Carter 3 episodes, Peter Collingwood Kennedy 3 episodes, Maggie Dence A Town Like Alice 3 episodes, Lorna Lesley Rose Sawyer 3 episodes, Maurie Fields Al Burns 3 episodes, Arkie Whiteley Annie 3 episodes, Tim McKenzie Pete Fletcher 3 episodes, Steve Bisley Tim Whelan 3 episodes, Lois Ramsey Driver 3 episodes, Isabel Kirk Duveen 3 episodes, Tommy Lewis Bourneville 3 episodes, Syd Heylen Art Foster 3 episodes, Peter Kowitz A Town Like Alice Pilot 3 episodes, Robert Noble Dragon Pilot 3 episodes, Ed Turley Police Sergeant 3 episodes, Peter Paulson Flying Doctor 3 episodes, Derek Wyness Don Curtis 3 episodes, Gertude Treloar Palmolive 3 episodes, Gary Priest Bush Brother 3 episodes, Lofty Cannard Crocodile Shooter 3 episodes, Anne Haddy Edit Storyline Set against the brutal chaos of World War A Town Like Alice, a love story begins that will take two lovers through a living nightmare of captivity, across three continents and two decades. Edit Did You Know?