A Town Like Alice Literary Elements

World War II fiction/Romance

The story begins in London just after World War II before flashing back to when Jean Paget was a Japanese prisoner of war in Malaya and finally concludes in the town like Alice—Willstown, Australia after the protagonist has left England for good.

The story begins as a straightforward first-person narration by Noel Strachan, a lawyer who subjectively relates the experiences of legal dealings with Jean Paget. When Paget relates her story to Noel through flashback, Strachan is still the de facto narrator but is conveying the story through an objective third-person perspective.

The mood of the story is dark and semi-tragic, but the tone is curiously disengaged emotionally as it sets out to relate a realistic portrait of a woman struggling to survive in a cross-culturally misogynistic society.

Protagonist: Jean Paget. Antagonist: systemically ingrained misogyny.

The primary conflict is between Jean and the other female prisoners of war with their Japanese oppressors. It is only through overcoming this conflict that Jean can find entrepreneurial success in Australia after the war.

Jean’s story climaxes with discovering that Joe Harman, a young Australian POW who had been crucified and assumed dead, is alive. Jean and Joe marry and have children.

In England before she heads off to Australia, Jean has a job that she describes without enthusiasm: “We make ladies' shoes and handbags, Mr Strachan, and small ornamental attache cases for the high-class trade—the sort that sells for thirty guineas in a Bond Street shop to stupid women with more money than sense.” Said early in the book, this quote foreshadows how Jean will eventually wind up founding a shoemaking enterprise in the Outback making shoes for poor girls.

Jean describes her experience during the war to the narrator, Mr. Strachan, engaging in extreme understatement. She admits only to being “a sort of prisoner” but not in a camp where “they left us pretty free.” In reality, her experience was nightmarish.

Allusion is used to symbolize Joe Harman as a Christ-like figure. “The Australian, in her mind, had had the power of healing, because the medicines he brought had cured her dysentery and Johnnie Horsefall's ringworm. It was beyond all doubt that they had been blessed in every way since his death for them.”

Imagery is also engaged to connect Joe Harman symbolically to Jesus, even to the point of both names beginning with a “J.” "They took us all down to Kuantan, and they nailed his hands to a tree, and beat him to death.” The imagery of nails being driven through Joe’s hands and being nailed to a tree recurs several times to emphasize Joe’s Christ-like sacrifices.

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The title of the book itself is an example of metonymy. The title refers to the Australian town of Alice Springs. Jean wants to turn Willstown into a “town like Alice” in which Alice represents the broader concept of Alice Springs as a progressive town as a result of economic growth while still maintaining a small-town sense of community and values.

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