Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally review

Keneally's ingenuity comes to the fore in this compelling fictionalised account of how Japanese PoWs staged a breakout in New South Wales

As a child of the second world war, Thomas Keneally has vivid memories of the midwinter night in 1944 when a group of Japanese prisoners staged a breakout from an internment camp close to the New South Wales town of Cowra. In the introduction to this fictionalised retelling of events, he recalls a great aunt who took to sleeping with an axe, and farmers leaving rifles for their wives: "We did not understand its motives which lay beyond the horizons of our culture and imagination," Keneally writes. "We judged them to include the intent to do unspeakable damage to women, children and men, in that order."

More than 230 Japanese were killed during the escape (along with a small number of Australian guards) and all the survivors were recaptured within 10 days. Though Keneally's novel is grounded in fact, it replaces the town of Cowra with an imagined equivalent named Gawell. And though the correspondences are clear, the passage of time enables Keneally to reveal the true motive behind the breakout: it was not a show of aggression intended to terrorise the population, so much as a grand, tragic act of self-immolation.

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