Characters in "King Rat"
- The King: an American corporal; at the end of the novel he is sent back to the United States under an impending investigation for illegal profiteering in a prison camp, and is never seen again by Marlowe
- Peter Marlowe: the main protagonist, a young British fighter pilot who later becomes an author; based on James Clavell
- Robin Grey: an older British officer, after the war he becomes a member of Parliament and a Russian agent
Two characters from King Rat also appear in Noble House (published 1981), a novel set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, when Marlowe is a writer visiting Hong Kong to do research on the great British trading companies there. Grey, embittered by his failure to obtain a commission in the postwar British Army despite his suffering during the war, has become a radical socialist Member of Parliament and is also in Hong Kong on an official visit. Unknown to Marlowe, Grey has become a secret Communist and a Soviet agent who tries to thwart efforts to improve relations between China and the West.
Read more about this topic: King Rat (1962 novel)
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“Of an old King in a story
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—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“A rat crept softly through the vegetation
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On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)