Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Man Booker Prize this month, knocks you down, pulls you up, then knocks you down again even harder, until all you can do is surrender to the pounding blows, let the power of the novel seep into you. There is a scene, roughly halfway through the book, about Australian pows in Burma, that almost exactly parallels the harrowing effect the book has on the reader. In the episode, the author shows us an Australian pow called Darky Gardiner, a likeable rogue, being beaten to death by Japanese and Korean prison guards. The incident is described over 16 long pages, and it is one of the most disturbing pieces of writing I have encountered in recent literature. At one level, it is an extraordinary evocation of the depths of inhumanity that people can sink to in times of war, but at another level it is a brilliant way to show the power of love. As Gardiner meets a hellish end, the author describes the mood of his comrades who have witnessed him die: “It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn’t, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, was answered. And the feeling of gratitude that it had been someone else gnawed in their guts, along with the hunger and the fear and the loneliness, until the question returned, refreshed, renewed, underneath. And the only answer they could make to it was this: they had each other. For them, forever after, there could be no I or me, only we and us.”
This is not an easy book; few great novels are. When you’re done with it, the glimpse it affords into the blackness of men’s souls, and the (possibly) redemptive nature of love, will give you a deeper appreciation of novels, and how they help us understand the lives we lead.
If the death of Darky Gardiner, and the effect it has on his friends and comrades, is the dark beating heart of the book, its central character and driving force is a doctor-soldier called Dorrigo Evans (“one of Australia’s greatest war heroes”) who is the colonel in charge of the Australian pows interned in Siam’s humid tropical jungles in early 1943. Evans’s men are a part of the thousands of prisoners that the Japanese will use to build the ‘Death Railway’—a desperate scheme cooked up by the Japanese to supply men and materiel to fight the war in Burma. The Death Railway was expected to stretch for 415 kilometres “from north of Bangkok all the way through to Burma.... It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were laid down over the next year to build it.”
We first meet Dorrigo Evans, aged 77, long after the war is over, when he is “a famous and celebrated surgeon, the public image of a time and a tragedy, the subject of biographies, plays and documentaries.... He understood that he shared certain failures, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him”. Having set up the novel very effectively this way, Flanagan then takes us on a journey of discovery into the life of his hero. We move quickly through his childhood and growing up years, and then pause at the most momentous event of his life before the war. Evans is in Adelaide, in the final phase of his training as an army doctor, when he wanders into an old building where a literary event is taking place. Finding the function mystifying and boring, he heads off to an unoccupied part of the store, and is browsing through the books he finds there when he is disturbed by a noisy group of people. Among them is a small blonde woman with a crimson camellia in her hair. Amy. He is immediately drawn to her, as she is to him. Nothing happens at that first encounter but a little while later, when he visits an uncle who owns a bar called ‘The King of Cornwall’, he runs into the young woman again. It turns out that she is married to his uncle, but the attraction between them is too strong to be denied, and they become lovers. Dorrigo Evans has been courting a woman called Ella, who belongs to one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished families, whom he will eventually marry. However, his one true love, the one whose memory he will carry into the depths of hell, is Amy. He ships out to war, surrenders to the Japanese, and is sent to one of the pow camps in the middle of the jungle to build ‘The Line’.
There are hundreds of novels in English that deal with World War II but very few of them deal with the conflict in Southeast Asia and the Far East. If you exclude the fiction that is set in Japan and China, there is almost nothing to be had. In fact, the only novel I could remember was published over sixty years ago—The Bridge Over the River Kwai, by the French writer Pierre Boulle (and I am not sure I even read the book, perhaps all I did was see the David Lean movie). This novel shines a light on a little known theatre of war that should figure a lot more in the hearts and minds of those in this country. Like many others of my generation, I remember stories my mother told me of growing up in Burma, then a part of British India, the horror of the war, the desperate flight to safety in other parts of the country that many families made—my maternal grandfather made the epic trek with thousands of others from Rangoon to Calcutta in 1942/43 (there were no ships or planes to be had), braving marauding Japanese troops, wild animals, leeches, cholera and other dangers.
But let’s leave the relevance of this theatre of war to Indian readers aside for a moment; what should make you pick up and read the book is that it’s a truly brilliant piece of fiction. In Richard Flanagan’s investigation of war and its depravity, every character is brilliantly nuanced—even the most brutal Japanese guard or officer—and there are some truly dreadful characters in the book, like Major Nakamura, the Korean prison guard called ‘The Goanna’, and Colonel Kota, a senior Japanese officer, who likes nothing better than slicing off the heads of prisoners, while poetry runs wild in his head. No, even these vicious men are prisoners in their own way, trapped as much in the ongoing horror of war, as the men they kill and brutalise. Because, as Flanagan says, “War stories deal in death. War illuminates love; while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.”
This month, Richard Flanagan is probably the most famous literary novelist alive. Many tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of copies, of this novel will be bought. I dearly hope that a large percentage of those who buy the book will actually read it through to the end. I say this because I think it can fundamentally change the way you look at the important things in your life—the way you deal with the business of living, loving, dying and much else besides. Only great fiction can do that, and this is one of the great ones.
