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    Shame and the Captives: A Novel
    Shame and the Captives: A Novel
    Shame and the Captives: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    Shame and the Captives: A Novel

    Written by Thomas Keneally

    Narrated by Heather Bolton and Paul English

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs staged the largest and bloodiest prison escape of World War II.

    Alice is living on her father-in-law’s farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian inmate at the prisoner-of-war camp down the road, is assigned to work on the farm, she hopes that being kind to him will somehow influence her husband’s treatment. What she doesn’t anticipate is how dramatically Giancarlo will change the way she understands both herself and the wider world.

    What most challenges Alice and her fellow townspeople is the utter foreignness of the thousand-plus Japanese inmates and their deeply held code of honor, which the camp commanders fatally misread. Mortified by being taken alive in battle and preferring a violent death to the shame of living, the Japanese prisoners plan an outbreak with shattering and far-reaching consequences for all the citizens around them.

    In a career spanning half a century, Thomas Keneally has proven brilliant at exploring ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary events. With this profoundly gripping and thought-provoking novel, inspired by a notorious incident in New South Wales in 1944, he once again shows why he is celebrated as a writer who “looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match” (Sunday Telegraph).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateFeb 24, 2015
    ISBN9781442376564
    Author

    Thomas Keneally

    Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published thirty-three novels since, most recently Crimes of the Father, Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives, and the New York Times bestselling The Daughters of Mars. He is also the author of Schindler’s List, which won the Booker Prize in 1982, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of nonfiction, including his boyhood memoir Homebush Boy, The Commonwealth of Thieves, and Searching for Schindler. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney, Australia.

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    Reviews for Shame and the Captives

    3.5/5

    37 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a fictional story set around a true event. A prison break in NSW, Australia in 1944 where as the blurb puts it: "more than one thousand Japanese prisoners of war staged the largest and most violent prison escape of World War II." The author was 9 years old at the time and states it was terrifying. So we know at the outset how this is going to end up.There is a very long buildup to the prison break. The opening chapter set in Japan in 1946 intrigues the reader with a brief story of Aoki returning home, but then we go to Australia in 1943-1944 to learn some history. This historical drama has some odd romance in it but the story takes a while to build. I found it a rather tedious portrayal of a handful of Australians and Brits as well as a few of the prisoners and prison guards (the prisoners were more interesting, little that we got about them). I never felt like I would stop reading this, but I was underwhelmed and can't find a reason to praise it. Keneally seems to enjoy painting women as man hungry.Some readers find a real insight into understanding Japanese soldiers' martial and moral code in World War II, something that I for one have always had a hard time understanding - banzai death charges, never surrender, disembowel yourself, kamikazes. This does give a person some insight in how it might be inside the soldiers' heads. The captured soldiers live in shame for not having died in battle. They want an honorable death.
    • 1/5
      I really expected more from this book. Rather than showing me, the author kept telling me about the cultural differences and anxieties. This grew very tedious and boring after a while. Overall, a bust.
    • 4/5
      Based on a real historic event, the author has embellished the tale, changing some of the locations and adding characters to create a narrative about prisoners of war during WWII, but the tale concentrates largely on the escape the Japanese prisoners planned and carried out in Australia. Using facts about the Japanese code of conduct, their demand for honor, obedience and nationalism, he has caught the atmosphere of those times and those prisoner’s mindsets. The story concentrates on the captives and the captors and their relationships to each other and to their families; it largely concerns the Japanese prisoners but also illuminates the practice of using the Italian prisoners as farm hands instead of placing all of them in prison barracks and compounds. It lightly touches on the way the British prisoners of war were treated by their Japanese captors, but it is obvious that they were not treated as well, nor were the Geneva Convention followed. The Japanese would not accept defeat, did not want to be taken prisoner, and did not believe in giving up. Constantly on their minds was the thought of living to fight another day or dying with honor either at the hands of their enemies or at their own hand.Around this 1944 event, Keneally has created a fictional narrative, including romantic impulses and infidelities due to the loneliness and distance war creates, and the nature of the characters seems very plausible, under the circumstances. The barbaric behavior of the Japanese is well documented, and the naivete of the Allies in their treatment of the enemy is evident. In the Japanese culture, their honor superseded the value of their lives and they believed that it was their duty to die fighting. It was sheer cowardice to allow the enemy to take them prisoner. Those that were captured, therefore, were recalcitrant, often giving false names so their families would not know they were alive and would mourn them as dead, honoring their memories as brave soldiers who died for their country, rather than as cowards who laid down their arms and were captured..The arrogance and social distinctions that the British observed was also very well represented. It was that very arrogance that led to many of their mistakes in dealing with the prisoner outbreak. Each culture reacted differently to the loss of their family member and each culture treated prisoners with varying degrees of respect, with the Japanese often abusing their prisoners while the British might have babied them a bit, providing for many creature comforts and distractions, never thinking them capable of the brutality they eventually carried out, not thinking that they might want to even break out when they could stay safe until the war ended and return home to their families if they followed the rules. The clash of cultures was apparent for the Japanese believed capture was shameful and humiliating; they tried to entice the victors to murder them by running at their weapons or attacking them so that they in turn would be attacked, or else, they even resorted to suicide which to them was an honorable death, more honorable than being a captive, eventually to be returned to society, to a society that had already mourned their loss and would have to revisit that trauma and perhaps shame. While the English and Italian soldiers would most likely be welcomed back home, the Japanese might very well be ostracized for what was considered shameful behavior by a soldier.
    • 3/5
      This book is a fictionalised and relocated account of the Cowra Breakout of 1944 where Japanese prisoners of war staged an escape from their internment camp (In rural Australia) and many lives were lost. An interesting story but a bit meandering with some pointless side stories. Not one of Keneally's best.
    • 4/5
      As you would expect from Tom Keneally some parts of this novel are hard to take. I needed to take a few breaks to regain my composure. The characters are frustratingly human refusing to fit the hero, villain moulds and the action is graphic and suspenseful, leaving the reader with much to contemplate not the least being your own fears and prejudices’. Definitely worth a read!
    • 4/5
      I was eager to read Shame and the Captives, not only because I haven't read anything by Keneally since highschool, which seemed remiss of me given his status in Australian literature, but primarly because I was particularly intrigued by the premise.It was only a few months ago I learned (thanks to Hannah and Emil) that during World War 2 Australia interred thousands of residents of 'enemy blood' . For some reason, I didn't consider that Australia would also have hosted Prisoners of War, largely I suppose because of the relative distances between the main fighting fronts and our country, excepting the attempted Japanese incursions in the north.The story of Shame and The Captives closely follows the events of the Cowra Breakout in 1944. Camp B of No. 12 Prisoner of War Compound (Cowra) was the scene of a bloody skirmish when many of the 1,104 Japanese prisoners of war tuned on their captors and attempted to escape. While Keneally clearly states in a foreword titled "Where the Tale Comes From" that the Shame and The Captives is, "a parallel account, or a tale provoked by the events that unfolded in Cowra" and further that his characters "are not designed to reflect any virtues, sins, follies, fevers and acts of courage evident in any of the real actors in the Cowra outbreak", this novel is a blend of fact and fiction.Keneally's representation of the events and the people involved may be fictional but it seems an entirely plausible account, with the histories, personalities and motives the author ascribes to the characters seemingly authentic in light of what we know of history. Delving not only into the lives of the men in the camp, the Japanese prisoners like Tengan and Aoki, the camp commander, Colonel Abercare and his subordinate Suttor, Shame and the Captives extends beyond the camps boundaries into the community, represented primarily by Alice and her father-in-law Duncan.Exploring the themes of shame, honour, belief, loyalty, cultural disparity, compassion and respect, Keneally provides context for the Cowra Breakout and Australian society in the period of war.One of the interesting ideas Keneally explores is Australia's trust that if they treated their prisoners with care (according to the Geneva Convention), their soldiers in the custody of enemy nations would be treated with equal fairness. Suttor and Alice, whose respective son and husband are POW's, cling to this ideal. Unfortunately the Japanese mostly despised the Australians for their compassion, since their honour code insisted that death was preferable to imprisonment. The Breakout then, was essentially a mass suicide attempt, a means for the Japanese to die with the honour their beliefs demanded of them.While I was utterly fascinated by the story of the Shame and The Captives, unfortunately I found the writing, with very little dialogue, often dry and dispassionate. I was in some ways reminded of a school history lesson worksheet where an attempt is made to enliven the learning of facts by couching them in a story. Had I not been so intrigued by this period of history, Keneally's prose may have resulted me in abandoning it.Nevertheless, I consider Shame and the Captives to be a compelling and thought provoking novel, one I particularly would recommend to Australians interested in our country's history.