Namely the King, Peter Marlowe, and Gray. (The movie presents a different image of the characters simply because of the trimming of content - it fails to reflect the inner struggles of Gray and Marlowe).
Good timing - I just read this book for the first time a month ago.
I found it very difficult to judge the characters. The setting is one for which I have almost no personal reference. I find it difficult to imagine myself in a situation so hellish, so I can’t really predict what constitutes morality in it.
From everything I’ve read about prison and other stressful situations, one does what one must to remain sane. Results seem to vary widely.
It was easy for me to dislike pretty much every character in the book in a superficial way. But the morality of a place like that is so subjective that I don’t think I can begin to justfiy any feelings I had toward the characters.
Oh man, this is one of my all-time favorite books!! I especially loved it after I learned it was based on the author’s real life experiences. I don’t own a copy and I last read it last year, so forgive me if I remember things wrong.
My favorite character in it was Steven (?), the transsexual character. But all the characters were so well written, I can’t help but wonder which ones really were certain people and which ones were combinations of the personalities of two or three or just figments of Clavell’s imagination. Peter Marlowe obviously represented Clavell, but how much of him did it represent.
I suggest that everyone read this book if they haven’t already.
Sean. Steven was the nurse.
The character I could relate to the most was Gray, the moralist. Although he was quixotic and despicably chickenshit on quite a few levels, he kept his rigid moral standards through the endand almost lost the will to survive as a result thereof upon finding that Smedly-Taylor, previously seen by Gray and others as the embodiment of the ideal officer, was in on the stealing of rice rations. To quote either Mac or Marlowe (I forget which) from earlier in the book, “without hope, man is but an animal.”
King, the pragmatist, engaged in fraud that was not necessary for his survival and may have well endangered the lives of others. His world view amounted to (paraphrased) “First, poverty is a disease. Second, you must get money. Third, it does not matter how you get it.” I had very little sympathy for him.
Marlowe seemed like an imperfect balance of the two. He did eventually compromise his morality, but for the sake of Mac and Larkin. Even so, he questions his decisions in the end, but his father, the only person who could have helped untangle the situation in his head, had died on a Murmansk run. Very open to interpretation.
It is my favorite novel because the characters are truly human. There is no absolute good, though Steven and Daven come very close to such, and no absolute evil. Although I have no connection to the backgrounds of the inmates, it moved me more than any account of Auschwitz ever could. It is a holy book in its own way.
Out of nearly twenty people whom I talked into reading the book in the past two years, many sympathized with Marlowe, and none with Gray. Ironically, only the two readers who were leftmost politically among the group (Greens, not Marxists) admired the King.