["King Rat"] is quite unmistakably bad and yet might, one feels, conceivably have been good…. [This] is a novel about the inhabitants of a Japanese camp called Changi, near Singapore….

[Many] of the most popular contemporary novelists are storytellers. Some of them produce such crude works that they don't seem worth discussion in this space. Others, although their novels are crude also, tell their tales with such compelling force and unceasing narrative drive that they demand critical attention. James Clavell is such a writer. His first novel, "King Rat," was an utterly engrossing tale of violence and corruption inside a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. It asked but did...

James Clavell's blockbuster of a first novel, "King Rat,"… presents an age-old dilemma against the background of a Japanese prison camp…. [The] chief dramatic interest in "King Rat" is not so much the clash of ideals as the unremitting pressure of the Changi compound itself and its effect on the thousands of prisoners living and dying within its boundaries. Some become informers; some rise to new levels of heroism; some are reduced to dithering protoplasm. In...

In his bestselling first novel King Rat, James Clavell may have been only clearing his throat for [Tai-Pan], which seems every bit as long as it is. Its narrative pace is numbing, its style is deafening, its language penny dreadful. All the characters whirl like dervishes, especially Dirk Struan, a kind of Scottish superman who can borrow $5,000,000 in silver ingots from an Oriental tycoon, invent binoculars, and corner the world supply of cinchona bark, all without breathing very hard. Well, almost. His Sc...