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1942: Boldly advancing through Asia, the Japanese need a train route from Burma going north. In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.
Language
Original language
French
User reviews
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Take The Seed and the Sower (that's Christmas, Mr Lawrence) to you, visually oriented sorts), remove all the rough trade and fragile beauty and homoeroticism (which basically means removing its spine) and then go further and remove every iota of insight into the human condition or old-hand
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I-was-thereness or thinly finctionalized historical facts or any of the normal reasons people read books, and you've got the story at the start, of Nicholson and Saito. They build the bridge. Then realize you need to give people a reason not to throw this shit down in dismay and add a plodding, unimaginative special-forces jungle-mission story. They tear the bridge down. It's not enough. Boulle was not there--he was a rubber engineer–cum–Free French agent who spent the war cooling his heels in a Vichy prison in Vietnam, and that is a little noble but he doesn't know anything about anything and it shows. He way, way softballs the atrocities of the Burma Road, rendering it a kind of French vision of a British East India Hogan's Heroes (ever watched any French action movies? You're 1/5 of the way to how goofy and unfortunate this is). There is some minor interest in Nicholson, who approaches the world with the rationalizing racist brain of a Victorian engineer--they all do, but for whatever reason he is the one who takes the plunge and agrees to help the enemy and build the bridge harder and faster to show those Japs what real Europeans can do, for his honour, like (this is not how it happened in reality, NB, where honour took a back seat to fucking up the enemy every which way possible took a back seat to self-preservation). A book full of engineer brains is at least potentially a novelty, but then Boulle ruins it by being comically, horribly, ruminate-and-then-suddenly-froth-at-the-mouthly racist agains the Japanese: all the tropes here we've seen before in the bad old style, the bow legs buck teeth little squat stupid slovenly incompetent inscrutable cringing bullying quavering grunting man-apes, the burly brutish Korean gorilla-men, the fact is here though that Boulle really goes that extra mile--he can't get off it for a second, he really wants you to agree with him, like the sweaty guy at the pub or bus stop who won't shut up, that they're subhuman those Asians and that rational Europe (for him, basically, European civilization means bridges and scientific management, the ability to get that little bit of extra productivity out of your employees, this is aaaalmost verging on Nazi-ish stuff here, petty wonder at inhuman efficiency, funny enough). It has that interest as a very pure example of the late-modern late-colonial mentality--"without us these troglodytes couldn't even build a bridge, let's just do it for them so we can get on with spanking them and sending them back to their Emperor"--but in a more meaningful way it is, of course, filthy trash. (It's especially funny because it's the Japanese, who, um, shall we say, know a thing or two about scientific management? Who were turning out aesthetic triumphs and a whole supporting philosophy with their eyes shut while Europe was in training pants and Caesar haircuts? Oh yeah, they're the savages.) Show Less
LibraryThing member benmartin79
While the story in this novel is exciting and the characters are intriguing (if occasionally far-fetched), the dissonance between the story of this novel and the actual invents by which the novel was presumably inspired is somewhat disturbing, if not outright offensive. An unfortunate aspect to
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what is on the whole not a bad novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member Stbalbach
Bridge Over the River Kwai (1952) is a short genre WWII adventure tale loosely based on real events. Its literary virtues, self-conscious and formulaic, can be attributed to Joseph Conrad's influence, in particular Lord Jim, about Victorian moral certitudes within a crumbling British Empire, the
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ridged view of the system being more important than the individual - staple fare for the the modernist writer. Boulle is best known as author of Planet of the Apes (1963) and Bridge oddly foreshadows it with a quote about the Japanese: "Monkeys dressed up as men! The way they drag their feet and slouch around, you'd never take them for anything human." Boulle is Conrad-light with a talent for ironic racism. Excellent movie adaptation. Show Less
LibraryThing member 5hrdrive
The movie is better, but this is quite good. I understand the character of Colonel Nicholson better now, having read the book - he's just as British as they come. The racism is pretty jarring, but when you consider the subject and the age of the book, it's understandable.
LibraryThing member Phurge
ok novel, better movie.
LibraryThing member tommi180744
A very fine WW2 novel of the horrors of Allied POWs existence building the notorious Burma railway under the barbaric attentions of the Japanese. Alternatively we can read it as a masterly tragic narrative exposing the clash of 'West' and 'East' cultures where "saving face", "stiff upper lip",
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"imperialism" of peoples made 'inscrutability' on both sides impossible to comprehend or overlook. Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
Pierre Boulle wrote two novels which later became films. He writes very sparse novels, evoking rather than describing the environments of his stories, and the Bridge is a very good novel indeed. The film giving the director a lot of independence in details was also very good indeed. Read the book
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before watching the movie, because this is not a "novelization" of the film, and both novelist and director will get full credit for their work. the book had its French publication in 1952. Show Less
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
Based on the true story of a WW2 episode in Thailand. The movie is excellent and has some great acting...
LibraryThing member DrFuriosa
This book is absolutely not the best World War II story out there, and it is most definitely a product of its time. Themes of nationalism and Western superiority pervade what could have been an engaging character study. I bet Tim O'Brien parodied this when he wrote "How to tell a true war story."