Shame and the Captives review Thomas Keneally's second world war novel

The Australian novelist recreates an escape by Japanese prisoners of war in New South Wales in 1944

Keneally was nine years old when he lived through the events that inspired this novel, his 30th. It was 1944, in a small town in New South Wales that contained an army prison camp and a group of Japanese prisoners of war escaped. He remembers a great aunt sleeping beside an axe, in case enemy fighters found their way to her door.

Unlike the author's best known book, Schindler's Ark , which stuck closely to the historical record, Shame and the Captives is adapted loosely from that event. Keneally invents a large ensemble of characters and an analogous town, and his third-person prose alternates between the viewpoint of distracted Australian officers, a lonely wife who falls for an Italian labourer on her farm, and several intensely disciplined Japanese captives haunted by their failure to commit suicide on the battlefield rather than be captured.

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