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This is a marvellous book! Heartwarming, romantic, poignant, and based on two true stories. Everyone in our reading group loved it and gave it five stars. Some of us had read it before, some of us were reading it for the first time, and a few of us had seen the film version with Peter Finch and Virginia McKenna, or the 1980’s television series with Bryan Brown, Helen Morse and Gordon Jackson. The story, partly set in wartime Burma, partly in post-war Britain, and partly in Australia, is really gripping, and the characters are well-drawn and very likeable. One member thought that heroine Jean Paget should be up there with Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett as great female characters in fiction. Nevil Shute is now considered to be old-fashioned, and there were racist and sexist elements but this would have been the norm when it was written in 1950 so we have to accept that. We compared the Burma segment to ‘The Railway Man’ and the ‘Tenko’ drama series, and some members had relatives who had had similar experiences, so we had a very interesting discussion about this wonderful classic novel.
