“And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.”
Not exactly a subtle metaphor.
King Rat, by James Clavell.
This was Clavell’s first novel and if you have read Clavell’s other, more famous novels (e.g. Shogun), you will be surprised that it is absolutely nothing like them. All his other novels are Big—big in both page count and scope. They are novels that take in the wide scope of Japan in the 1600s and then in the 1860s, Hong Kong in the 1840s and then the 1960s, Iran in 1979. All societies in the midst of massive change.
Then there is King Rat, set in a POW camp in Singapore during the Second World War. It is a claustrophobic novel in comparison, fitting because living in a POW camp is, to put it mildly, claustrophobic. It is also a semi-autobiographical novel; Clavell drops a version of himself into the novel and minutely conveys what life was like in a semi-barbaric world where finding ways to get more food is the primary intellectual activity.
Clavell’s prose is that type that just flows along, never too flashy but never cringe-inducing. There is never that moment of literary flair that will make you think you are reading a Great Book; but there is also never that moment when you want to just toss the book aside because you cannot stand how ham-handed the last paragraph was.
Clavell was one of the first grown-up novelists I discovered back in high school. I loved his books, but King Rat was far and away my least favorite. As noted above, not what I was expecting. I wanted another Shogun, and instead I got the British Clavell stand-in Peter Marlowe and the scrappy American known only as the King and the British MP Grey who deeply resents both of the other two. All three of them are fixed in an intricate dance about a fundamental moral question. Suffice it to say that my high school self had nothing even remotely resembling the awareness necessary to grasp what was going on in this novel.
To get at the question, think about your own life for a moment. You live in civilized society and you have all manner of rules of conduct which you would never think about breaking. Indeed, you are proud of yourself for the way you never break any of these cultural rules. You are not a barbarian, after all. Perhaps you also hold your fork in your right hand or always wear shoes at work or never swear out loud or bathe regularly. Perhaps you never tell a lie, never steal, follow the law, or never deliberately cheat anyone. There is a whole list of things like that. You do them instinctually because they are the right thing to do. You never sit around and wonder if you should brush your teeth, you just brush them because you are not, and never will be, a barbarian.
Now place yourself in a POW camp in Singapore in WWII. How many of those cultural rules do you break? Some of them you will have to break whether you like it or not; you won’t get to regularly bathe or brush your teeth, for example. But, do you still always use the proper hand for eating? Probably. Or at least you will most of the time.
What about the higher order moral habits? This is where King Rat comes in. Marlowe is faced with a crisis. On the one hand, he is a cultured member of the British upper class. There are rules, you see. You follow the rules. On the other hand, he starts to build a relationship with the King. What is the King like? Imagine every stereotype about Americans which a member of the British Upper Class would have, and there you have the King. A crass, money-grubbing, swindling, con-man who breaks every rule in sight to make a quick buck in the black market. Then on the other side, you have Grey, the epitome of a resentful member of the British lower class who cannot stand seeing the King get away with having nice things.
Marlowe’s problem: how involved should he become in the King’s underground enterprise? How many rules of civilized behavior is it OK to break? Once you cross the line, can you go back to being respectable? As Marlowe ruminates: “A man’s life is always at a crossroads. And not his life alone, not if he’s a man. Always others in the balance.”
The “others” add to the complexity. In the camp, if you want to survive, you form a pod, a small group of three which shares everything. If someone in your pod is sick or needs food or whatever, do you break all your moral rules to get it? That is the crossroads. It is not a pleasant place to be.
He found a small promontory overlooking the wire and wished himself into his Spitfire soaring the sky alone, up, up, up in the sky, where all is clean and pure, where there are no lousy people—like me—where life is simple and you can talk to God and be of God, without shame.
Why is it worth thinking about things like this? Why is King Rat more than just a pleasant way to spend a few hours reading a war story? When you are in your nice little cultured world following all your nice cultured rules it is easy to forget that you have such rules at all. King Rat puts you in a place where you realize a lot of those rules will go whether you like it or not. But, what are the cultural codes of conduct to which you would cling no matter what? You (presumably) don’t have plans to swindle someone tomorrow, but if you are living in a desperate situation, does it become OK to break that rule? Is stealing OK in a POW camp? Do you have any obligation to follow the rules? Does it matter if the rules are the implicit rules made by the people living in the camp or the ones made by the Japanese guards?
As you read King Rat it becomes obvious that Civilization is a very fragile thing. It doesn’t take much to imagine breaking all sorts of rules. And once those rules are gone, what is life like? Well, it is like being a rat. Kill or be killed. Cunning and Luck and Strength are the only rules left. Are you just a glorified rat?
There is the choice: Civilization or the Kingdom of Rats? Maybe this civilization thing is worth preserving after all. Maybe it is worth doing everything we can to teach children the norms of civilized behavior. Maybe if we see the culture crumbling, we ought to do something about it.
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