Wednesday, 17 December 2014

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

This book won the Man Booker Prize this year and the award is certainly deserved, unlike the title they chose last year.

The book is an amazing work of literature but it is brutal and devastating.  I had to put it away several times because I couldn't deal will the brutality and cruelty in it.

It is the story of an Australian doctor who ends up serving in a Japanese POW camp in Burma.  The man has a girl friend whom he proposes to, prior to leaving for the war.  However, he also has a passionate affair with his uncle's wife.

The largest part of the story is about the hardships and cruelty the prisoners in the POW camp face as they are tasked with building a railway through the jungle.  The book is graphic in details of the starvation, illness, cruelty of the Japanese officers and prison guards.  It also shows kindness that the prisoners showed to each other.  It also shows how the prisoners escape from the reality by remembering or daydreaming about life at home.  The doctor does his best to look after and fight for the soldiers.  He spends a lot of time thinking of his lover, Amy.

We learn that the man's uncle knew of the affair and tells his wife that Dorrigo, the Dr, has been killed in the war.  The Doctor's fiancee likewise writes him a letter telling him that his lover died in a fire at the hotel/bar his uncle and she ran.  Both things are untrue.

We then see the lives of some of the prisoners, guards and soldiers after the war.  The Japanese and guards think that they did nothing wrong, they were acting on behalf the the Emperor and they look upon the soldiers who surrendered as weak and thus deserving of everything they suffered.  Some of the prison camp staff are put on trial for war crimes and are sentenced to death but the major figures escape unscathed.  Dorrigo meets the wife of one of the soldiers who died in the camp, she tells him how lonely she is without her husband, they were deeply in love.

Dorrigo returns to Australia and marries his fiancee.  Despite acclaim he feels empty and the marriage is loveless.  He has numerous affairs trying to fill the emptiness he fells.    Dorrigo does rush through a barrier to save his wife and three children from a wildfire but it seems that he does this more as an automatic reaction, in an emergency, much like his work as a doctor in the POW camp, than an act of love.

One day he does see his lover and she sees him. He is surprised that she is still alive and does not approach her.  He assumes that the two little girls she is with are hers, they are her nieces.  She seems him and knew he was alive because of the news reports about him.  She had thought of contacting him but never did.  He had told her he would marry her.

The book does a brilliant job or representing the people and the lives, the good the bad and the ugly.  However, it was just so hard to read I don't think I would ever reread it.








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