what is the narrow road to the deep north about
Review: 'The Narrow Road to the Deep N,' by Richard Flanagan
"The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan. (Knopf)
Beware Richard Flanagan's new novel, "The Narrow Road to the Deep Due north." His story about a group of Australian POWs during World State of war 2 volition bandage a shadow over your summertime and describe you away from friends and family unit into night contemplation the mode only the near extraordinary books can. Aught since Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" has shaken me like this — all the more so considering it'south based on recorded history, rather than apocalyptic speculation.
A finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize, "The Narrow Road to the Deeper North" portrays a singular episode of manic brutality: imperial Nippon's construction of the Thailand-Burma Decease Railway in the early 1940s. The British had long investigated this route, but they deemed the jungle impenetrable. Once the Japanese captured Burma, though, its army needed a more efficient resupply route, and so the incommunicable became possible in just over a year past using some 300,000 people as disposable labor. Flanagan's late begetter was a survivor of that atrocity, which took the lives of more than 12,000 Centrolineal prisoners.
"I had known for a long time that this was the volume I had to write if I was to go along on writing," Flanagan said recently. "Other novels came and went equally I continued to fail to write this one." Those "other novels" that he refers to and then modestly include his 2001 masterpiece, "Gould's Book of Fish," which likewise dealt with the unfathomable abuse of prisoners. But the horrors of that story almost a 19th-century captive kept in a partially submerged cage in Tasmania were leavened by ribald humor and a way so lush that the sentences seemed to transport tendrils off the pages, which were printed in several unlike colors. "The Narrow Route to the Deep North" sports none of that dazzling showmanship. Its magic is darker and more than subtle, its impact more devastating. Here, Flanagan is writing most events that outstrip surrealism. His quiet, unrelenting style is often unbearably powerful. Not only an enlivened historical documentary or a corrective to Pierre Boulle'south "The Bridge over the River Kwai," this is a classic work of war fiction from a globe-class writer.
The story casts its roving eye on 77-year-old Dr. Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated war hero whose life has been an unsatisfying string of sterile affairs and public honors. He loved a woman once, but tragedy intervened, and since then each new award and commendation simply makes Dorrigo feel undeserving and fraudulent. "The more he was accused of virtue equally he grew older, the more he hated it," Flanagan writes. "Virtue was vanity dressed upward and waiting for applause." Asked to write the introduction to a collection of once-contraband sketches past one of the servicemen imprisoned with him in Siam, he begins to recall the experiences of that hellacious period.
Flanagan has e'er bent time to his art in the nigh captivating ways. His first novel, "Decease of a River Guide," played out the history of Tasmania in the few minutes it takes a human to drown. "The Narrow Road to the Deep Northward" has a more complex, impressionistic structure as it moves fluidly forward and backward, changing perspectives and locales, keeping us mesmerized but never confused. For many pages, the novel shimmers over the decades of Dorrigo's life, only flashing on the horrors of state of war and the ghosts who haunt him.
But soon plenty, that unspeakable period comes into focus in a series of blistering episodes you will never leave of your mind. As more senior captured officers succumb to disease, Dorrigo finds himself placed in command of 700 sickly prisoners who he "held, nursed, cajoled, begged, hoodwinked and organised into surviving, whose needs he always put before his own." (This character bears some resemblance to the Australian war hero Col. Edward "Weary" Dunlop.) The hospital tent, equipped only with rags and saws, is a theater of magical thinking and unfathomable gore. During i functioning scene, I confess that I forced my eyes downwards the page in a blur.
What stretches the story across the visceral hurting it brings to life is the attention paid to these men as individuals, their pettiness and their backbone, their acts of betrayal and affection, and their efforts to cling to trappings of culture no matter how slight or futile. The greatest burden and the i near affectingly portrayed is Dorrigo's moral conundrum: Every morning he begins bargaining with his Japanese captors, who insist that dying for the emperor is an honor sufficient to raise his men from the "shame" of existence captured. Dorrigo must select the healthiest prisoners for that mean solar day's burdensome labor. But his men — "like a muddy package of broken sticks" — are starving, suffering from cholera, and, in the never-ending rain, their ulcer-covered bodies are rotting away. The incessant torture described here is strikingly uncreative: no h2o boarding, no electrodes, nothing from the Dick Cheney Handbook for Liberators. Instead, the prisoners are simply kicked to death or beaten with bamboo poles to bloody mush. Dorrigo must strive to save each one, knowing that, ultimately, he can't rescue whatever of them and that their deaths hither in the jungle in service to an insane appetite mean nothing and will chop-chop be forgotten.
Amid the novel's most daring strategies is its periodic shift to the Japanese and Korean guards' points of view — both during and long after the war. Flanagan pulls us correct into the minds of these men raised on emperor worship, trained in a organisation of ritualized brutality and wholly invested in the necessity of their cause. Information technology's a harrowing portrayal of the force of civilisation and the way twisted political logic inflated by religious zeal can render obscene atrocities routine, even necessary. The novel doesn't exonerate these war criminals, only it forces us to admit that history conspired to place them in a state of affairs where cruelty would thrive, where the natural responses of homo kindness and sympathy were short-circuited. And in its final move, the story makes us confront the conundrum of evil men who later on go kind and gentle under the cleansing shower of their own denial. How infinite are our means of absolving ourselves, of rendering our crimes irrelevant, of mitigating the magnitude of others' hurting.
Ultimately, though, the tale belongs to Dorrigo, whose heroism is never sufficient to satisfy his own ideals. His ordeal equally "part of a Pharaonic slave organisation that had at its noon a divine sun king" seems the kind of psychic injury that never heals, but Flanagan insists that the existent source of the doctor's chronic despair is the loss of his 1 truthful love. That's a mystery spun here in prose as haunting and evocative as the haiku past 17th-century Japanese poet Basho that gives this novel its title. No other author draws us into "the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings" the way Flanagan does.
Charles is the editor of Book World. His reviews run in Style every Midweek. Yous can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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