Life at the helm in a Microcosm. Review on King Rat - James Clavell

Life in a Microcosm

Microcosms are a subset of reality, a small portion of the main that is somehow exploded or even imploded beyond its real value. One of the strongest examples of a microcosm is high school. There are usually a number of very self-important people in high school, and even more people who look up to them. They are very seldom actually in charge, important or even real. They end up bald, fat, overbearing, drinking beer and watching bad television shows as often as not. This of course doesn’t make them overly different than you or I, the truth is there are those who learn how to win, how to make themselves valuable under any circumstance, and there are simply those who take advantage of a strange situation.

Another such microcosm is prison, and prison camps. When James Clavell crafted the short and dynamic novel King Rat, he created such a world in miniature – a prison camp in Singapore during World War 2 where all men are created starving, where death and pain are the way of things. This is a world where the range of emotion is not compact but wildly sweeping and full of diverging climaxes. The men occupying this space were desperate.

Shawshank vs. Singapore – prisons in pain

In the Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King wrote the character Red, who was a man who could locate things from time to time. He was a man who was connected, he was beloved and bemused. Clavell created his character from the same cloth. He made King Rat a man who could locate things, and man who could take care of business in a pinch. He made King a man who could find his way around the camp, find his way around the guards, and who made himself the king of the camp, ultimately King Rat. His friend Peter began to disciple under him, learning about his business, getting the tricks, covering for him doing the grunt work. He comes to know the means to a comfortable life within the walls of hell.

The Scurrying Gourmet

He was known as King Rat because he began a little cottage industry, raising, butchering and selling rat meat to the local Japanese and to some in the camp. The truth is that the smell of roasting meat, when they would use it to market was unbearably sweet to those starving men in the camp. The industry was easy to run, the rats thrived and bred incredibly quickly. They figured up the timetables and came to understand that the rats would breed quickly enough to keep up with any demand in the food source that they encountered. In fact they began to fear that the rats would over populate, growing beyond their control. They began to wonder about the rat population becoming untenable and outlandish.

Ultimately, the Japanese lose control of the camp, and the prisoners are rescued. Certainly not until there have been some harrowing adventures, some truly near death moments and a lot of very graphic descriptions of the treacherous way that we and Britain were treated in the prison camps. As in all things, we graduate, we move on, we leave the microcosm, the bubble.

Back Home You are Just Folks

When it all comes apart at the seams, King Rat goes home to his humble life back in America, he simply fades away – it is like so many who are the king of a microcosm, when it all comes down to cases, some of them maintain their skilled edge, but most were simply the right man at the right spot in interesting times. Did they fulfill some kind of destiny for a while? Perhaps, so – King Rat surely would have defended his brilliance under a certain circumstance. Just remember that those that we admire so very much at times are just people, human, frail, botched and bungled. They may sell rat meat for a while, they may sleep a little more restively and they may not have to work their way through school…but the test of their character comes in the daily grind.

The test of that kind of character in and out of a microcosm is the brilliant lesson that Clavell tried to teach us in his powerful little novel. Don’t ever assume you know what kind of meat you are eating in a prison camp, and never over estimate the power of those who are ruling in an isolated, contained environment. Life is a long and patient thing.