April 1959
This story, by the author of The Bridge on the River Kwai, has a brilliant idea, its situations are treated with wit and it only stops short of being in the first class for an unusual and interesting reason: the author betrays one of his main characters.
The story is set in a big French rubber plantation north of Singapore, the estate being hedged about with jungle in which lurk Chinese Communist bands. Delavigne, the Frenchman who manages the estate, is married to an American, Pat, a ‘do-gooder’ who is convinced that charity and kindness will convert any Communist to democracy. After an entertaining parallel has been drawn of the identical behaviour of the French preparing for a visit from the Company director, and the Chinese in the jungle preparing for a visit from a Communist leader, the terrorists attack to seize the plantation’s monthly payroll, and Pat gets her chance. She finds a nineteen-year-old girl terrorist - Ling - badly wounded at the bottom of her garden, hides and nurses her, and eventually persuades her husband to consider her adoption.
Ling’s subsequent conflict and metamorphosis are very well done, but to describe the ending, the jacket tells me, would be unfair, so I won’t. I will, however, point out M. Boulle’s unfairness to his own idea. We are given explicitly to understand that Pat is a ‘good’ character, that her principles and behaviour are unexceptionable; even M. Boulle is too cowed, or too bored, by the sheer volume of her goodness to come out into the open about her; so he resorts to lip service while at the same time more ingeniously implying his dislike until, having put her in a position where it would really be interesting to know her reactions, he slides out of this responsibility. If a novelist cannot preserve the detachment necessary to present his characters in the round, then he must at least have the courage openly to convict them.