A powerful book. An American in a Japanese prison camp in Malaya heads a ring that does all kinds of nefarious activities, manipulating both prisoners and guards to obtain favors, money, food and privileges. While the rest of the camp starves and goes through terrible privations, this man lives like a king, with syncophants who act as servants to him in order to receive the largess. One of his schemes is for his minions to kill and sell rats as meat.

The narrator of the story is another prisoner-of-war in the camp who is taken under the wing of "King Rat" enough to observe him, but is not one of his henchmen. At the end of the story, when American soldiers liberate the camp, suddenly King Rat is treated like every other soldier. He is, in fact, a low-ranking corporal. That he is well-fed and healthy when everyone else is skin and bones is suspect, and there is an intimation that he may be charged with war racketeering.

I know a Dutchman, the son of missionaries who was imprisoned from the ages of 5 to 12 in a WW II Japanese prison camp in Indonesia. When American soldiers liberated the camp, they first air-dropped food to the people, mostly cans of sweetened condensed milk. After years of starvation, the man described it as being like manna from heaven. To this day, whenever he feels anxious, he opens a can of sweetened condensed milk and eats it straight from the can with a spoon.

Elmer