["King Rat"] is quite unmistakably bad and yet might, one feels, conceivably have been good….

[This] is a novel about the inhabitants of a Japanese camp called Changi, near Singapore….

[Whatever] an author's material, the question is what he is able to make of it, and this is closely related to another question: what attitude does he take towards it? By the end of this book, at any rate, Clavell's attitude can be defined: survival requires a kind of adaptation that controverts most accepted moral codes….

Clavell's approach to his material, then, is serious, at least in intention; but, as everyone knows, a novel is concerned only incidentally with ideas, and primarily with people. The moral dilemma that concerns Clavell is embodied in the lives of many characters, three of whom are of basic importance. Central is "the King," an American corporal who in a community of hunger...