Caroline Moore

An escape from New South Wales

Shame and the Captives, by Thomas Keneally, is not a perfect novel, but this fictional account of escapee Japanese POWs is gripping nonetheless

[Getty Images/iStockphoto]

Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from a camp in New South Wales. This intrinsically thrilling incident, triggered by a fascinating clash between mutually uncomprehending cultures, is an obvious gift to a writer. There may be some who claim that any novelist could therefore have produced an interesting fictional version of it; but this is like saying that anyone could have made a landscape out of the fine park at Blenheim. Keneally spotted both the tale and its possibilities, which in itself is a truly enviable talent.

His imagination is fired by the incongruities of the camp in the small town of Cowra, here fictionalised as Gawell. It consisted of four areas, containing European (chiefly Italian) PoWs in compounds A and D, a quarrelsome mix of Japanese officers and merchants, Taiwanese, Koreans and Indonesians in compound B, and a sullenly uncooperative mass of Japanese warriors in compound C. This tightly-packed, tense mass of humanity was placed in the strung-out rural society of an Australian back-water, living by the ‘patterns of daily tedium’.

The Japanese prisoners are all, to some degree or other, consumed by shame. They see themselves as dishonoured by surrender, even if unconscious when taken prisoner; death, even by suicide, would have been preferable. They give false names to their captors, not just to mislead the enemy but so that their families will not learn that they are alive. Returning home is not an option, and is not the point of escape.

It is an anthropological cliché to say that Japan has a ‘culture of shame’, and western civilisation a ‘culture of guilt’. But if guilt is a form of internalised shame, the two, as Keneally suggests, are affects or emotions on a sliding scale.

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