James Clavell (1924 – 1994)
Born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell, was a British novelist, screenwriter, director and a World War II hero and POW.
Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.
Grey was not alone in his hatred. The whole of Changi hated King. They hated him for his muscular body, the clear glow in his blue eyes. In the twilight world of the half alive there were no fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men. There were only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skin over sinews and bones. No difference between them but age and face and height. And in all this world, only the King ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man.
"Changi changed everyone, changed values permanently. For instance, it gave you a dullness about death — we saw too much of it to have the same sort of meaning to outsiders, to normal people. We are a generation of dinosaurs, we the few who survived. I suppose anyone who goes to war, any war, sees life with different eyes if they end up in one piece."
What did you see?"
"A lot of bull that's worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of 'normal, civilized' life is bull that you can't imagine. ... What frightens you, doesn't frighten me, what frightens me, you'd laugh at."
Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.
Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.
Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men. ...
These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.
Although historians sometimes disputed the historical accuracy of Mr. Clavell's novels, no one doubted his gifts as a storyteller, or his ability to draw the reader into a faraway time and place.
Help! Help me! Please help me! Help me!
I'm going to pray to our leader every time!
I get so scared sometimes. The suddenness of our age! Electronics, rockets, earth satellites, supersonic flight, and now this. It's not so much who invents them. It's the fact they exist. ... Everything's going so fast, I'm just not ready to take it all in. It's, it's all so quick
Perhaps my mommy should go back to school. Perhaps she should.
All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning.
I put the candy on the desk. So you know, it doesn't matter who you shut your eyes and pray to — to God, or anyone, even our leader — no one will ever give you anything. Only another human being ... only I, or someone like me, can give you things. Praying to God or anyone for something is a waste of time.
Maybe we didn't pray hard enough. Perhaps we should kneel down like is done in church. Perhaps were using the wrong name. Instead of God, let's say "Our Leader." Let's pray to our leader for candy! Let's pray extra specially hard, and don't open your eyes until I say.
So much wealth and so much power, Armstrong thought, yet with a little luck, we can bring you down like Humpty-Dumpty...
All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach.
If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too.
Just a moment, children — what does "pledge" mean?
Because Johnny was especially clever I think we should make him monitor for the whole week. Don't you?
Changi became my university instead of my prison. ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving.