One of the longer books on the Miles Franklin shortlist at 480 pages, The Narrow Road to the Deep North derives its name from famed haiku poet Basho’s most famous body of work – a poetic travelogue through Japan’s remote North-Eastern region. Along with protagonist Dorrigo Evan’s penchant for quoting from Tennyson’s Ulysses, the novel’s literary allusions enable Flanagan’s delineation of the relationship between Japanese soldiers and Australian prisoners of wars (POWs) at the height of World War II to mesh aesthetically in an ambitious war saga of epic proportions.
Dorrigo Evans is a celebrated war veteran, exalted in documentaries and well-rehearsed accounts of his medical heroism and leadership during the building of an impossible railway from Siam to Burma under the strict rule of the Japanese. Married to his pre-war sweetheart Ella and father of three children, Dorrigo works as a surgeon in his day job – presenting a seemingly idyllic portrait of a post-war life.
However, Dorrigo grapples with a form of post-traumatic stress disorder and is frequently haunted by the beating and subsequent death of one POW in particular. The main protagonist leads his life in a dispassionate haze – breaking his vow of monogamy only a month into his marriage and yielding to ‘circumstances and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty’. And there is the haunting memory of Amy, the young wife of his uncle and a woman with whom he embarked on an illicit affair in the months leading up to the war.
The novel oscillates between past and present, with the heart of it centred in the POW camp besieged by outbreaks of cholera, starvation, dysentery, malaria and all sorts of unimaginable diseases. Flanagan is at his most evocative when he’s taking a mirror to the abject treatment and disintegration the POWs suffer at the hands of both humans and nature. Not always easy reading, this section of the book is at once lugubrious and profound as it sheds light on the maelstrom of war atrocities borne by casualties long beyond capable of telling their tale.
The anecdotal tales of Flanagan’s father, himself a POW, form the basis of this section alongside the writings of POWs Clarry McCulloch, Donald Stewart, E.E. Dunlop and Kevin Fagan. Snippets of events expounded on by Flanagan are lifted verbatim from these war veterans’ accounts, lending verisimilitude to the story and grounding it with an inexorable sense of loss.
What enlivens The Narrow Road to the Deep North through its lengthy passages are the different viewpoints Flanagan employs to narrate his fictional saga. We hear from Amy, prisoners of wars such as Darky Gardiner, Jimmy Bigelow and Rooster McNeice, and Japanese officers Colonel Kuta and Major Nakamura. The most interesting parts of the novel lie in the reimagining of the Japanese officers’ lives after the war has ceased and presents a divergent picture of what happens when you are on the losing side of a war.
Instead of resorting to simplistic notions of good and evil or demonising enemies of war under the cloak of patriotism, Flanagan draws parallels between the tortured Australian POWs and the embattled Japanese officers indoctrinated with national ideology under a very different, yet no less severe, form of enslavement. In Flanagan’s narrative, regardless of which side of the war you’re on, the true masterminds are never captured and brought to justice. As a Korean officer bitterly observes, ‘But in their hearts they all knew that the Emperor would never hang and that they would’.
Though it is beautifully written, the plot arc between Dorrigo and Amy is the weakest link of the story as it draws on a well-worn trope. With only a scant portion of the book devoted to the lurid yet fleeting affair between them, the gravity assigned to it feels at once disproportionate and unbelievable. The ensuing questions remain unresolved and detract from the eventual denouement – why did one not approach the other or attempt to find more concrete answers in the aftermath of the war?
That aside, certain revelations towards the end of the novel shock with a resonance that forces readers to re-examine what they thought they knew, in a testament to Flanagan’s knack for rendering characters that are unforgettable in readers’ minds and his ability to foster an inescapable sense of tension only to shatter readers’ expectations.
Flanagan has crafted an inspired and affecting novel that goes to the heart of the oft touched on, yet highly unfathomable prisoner-of-war experience. Although it is the unrealised resolution surrounding Dorrigo and Amy’s relationship that is touted as the centrepiece of the novel, it is Flanagan’s depiction of the unquestioning love between fellow brethren that stays with readers.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
By Richard Flanagan
Softcover
480 pages
RRP: $32.99
ISBN: 9781741666700
Vintage Books
