The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Rating: 4 & ½ Stars

2014 Booker Prize

If I had done my usual due diligence before picking up this book, I would have discovered that this was yet another book about World War II. Not just about the Second World War, but a story about Japanese POWs. Then I would have avoided it; because reading ‘Unbroken’ was traumatizing enough, and why would I go through something like that again? But that would have been my loss.

Flanagan’s TNRTTDN is in equal parts ravishing and heart-breaking. The crux of the larger narrative is the building of the Burma Railway in 1943 – a construction feat engineered by the Empire of Japan, on the backs of forced labor and under the most savage conditions. The human cost of the Death Railway, as it was otherwise known, was horrific: an estimated 102,000 people – 90,000 civilian laborers and 12,000 Allied prisoners perished in the effort. The deaths were due partly to tropical illnesses; but overwhelmingly, the ultimate reason was the barbarous indifference of Japan to human life and suffering.

On a more intimate scale, the story is about the Australian POWs – those who succumb to the Death Railway, as well as its survivors. Flanagan, whose own father was one of the Australian survivors, has invested the historical narrative with depth of research and poignant humanity. The toll of building the railway is explored through the perspective of different POWs; as well as through the eyes of their embattled Japanese tormentors – men who were tasked with performing the impossible and who would give no quarter because they belonged to a time and culture where clemency was equated with weakness.

But TNRTTDN is also a love story. The novel’s protagonist is Dorrigo Evans – a senior medical officer at the Burma Railway who later becomes a renowned surgeon. Evans seems to have a charmed life in many respects. As an officer, he was not subject to the same privations as the other prisoners at the labor camp, and afterward he’s, quite rightly, hailed as a hero. But the public éclat that’s lavished upon him, and the good fortune of having family and friends leave no impression upon Dorrigo, obsessed as he is with the woman who got away, the love of his life – Amy Mulvaney.

One of the motifs of this book is the vastness of human history – the bewildering force of circumstances beyond our control that shape the destinies of nations and individuals. The other is the inexorable sweep of time in erasing all events, men, and man-made things. What may remain is memory. Remembrance is important – hence the seemingly endless stream of books that exhume old wars and past injustices. We remember our history so that we do not repeat its mistakes. But cling too desperately to the past, and we lose our happiness in the present. Few books I’ve read have expounded this as eloquently as ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’.