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’.

Shogun by James Clavell



Rating: 4 Stars

The last book I read that was as exciting as James Clavell’s ‘Shogun’ was…well, it was that other Clavell book I read. Like Tai-Pan, this book is also inspired by historical events. The story’s protagonist is based on  an English navigator,William Adams,  who became a trusted advisor to the 17^th. Century Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu.

At the start of the seventeenth century, John Blackthorn, the English Pilot-Major of the Dutch ship, the ‘Erasmus’ finds himself and his surviving crew run aground on Japanese shores. While Blackthorn finds himself desperately trying to succor assistance from his hosts, he has to keep at bay the Portuguese merchant marines who have already carved a niche in trading with Japan, and will jealously guard their hegemony at all costs. Adding to the complications, Blackthorn has to rely on the interpreting skills of fanatical Jesuit priests, the rare few Europeans who have learnt the Japanese language in their self-anointed mission to convert the heathens of the world to the Catholic faith.

The Japanese daimyos (feudal lords) and the samurai warriors Blackthorn encounters are little impressed with Western claims to empire-building. They are however very interested in the concept of naval warfare and how it could tip the balance in their favor in their own power struggles. It is either the Europeans’ rotten luck or golden opportunity, depending on how you look at it, that they become embroiled in a game of thrones where many heads will roll before the outcome is settled.

Clavell is a master story-teller. I’ve not come across many other writers who have his unique combination of sophisticated plot, intelligent synthesis of history and fiction, engaging characterization, and blood-tingling action. But reader beware, ‘Shogun’ is no easy-reading treat. It’s neither for the faint-hearted, nor for those with attention-deficit handicaps. There are stomach-turning descriptions of violence; and countless names, vendettas, and historical events to keep in mind. The book is marginally excellent and would have been more so, if Clavell had trimmed it by a third and provided a glossary for reference. It’s saying a lot that despite these flaws, ‘Shogun’ stands head and shoulders above much of contemporary fiction.

 ‘Civilization’ is after only a matter of perspective. Blackthorn may be confounded by the Japanese alacrity to shed blood at the least provocation; the Japanese are puzzled by the sectarian differences within the Christian religion, and by much of Christian theology. Each race is understandably horrified and disgusted by the cuisine and sanitation habits of the other. But in the end, as in Tai-Pan, here too, Clavell proves dear old Kipling wrong – East and West shall meet, and it is their mutual destiny to be repelled, fascinated, and ultimately enriched by the contact.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars

[Translated from the Turkish by Erdag M. Goknar]

Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006

“…Let it not be forgotten that in the Glorious Koran, ‘creator’ is one of the attributes of Allah. It is Allah who is creative… who brings that which is not into existence, who gives life to the lifeless. No one ought to compete with him. The greatest of sins is committed by painters who presume to do what He does, who claim to be as creative as He…”

This statement is the essential conflict of ‘My Name is Red’, Orhan Pamuk’s intricate tale of Art and murder in 16^th century Turkey under Ottoman rule. It’s a world where artistry is circumscribed by religious ideology, and where mad old painters aspire to blindness as the ultimate mark of Allah’s favor.

The world of these painters, or more correctly, miniaturists, is the centerpiece of the novel. They are anguished souls unable to unleash their true artistry, shackled to the traditions of the ‘old masters’, and forbidden to innovate. This last condition is proving especially cumbersome because the Ottoman Empire has become increasingly susceptible to the influence of European art with its dazzling use of perspective and seductive portraiture. But in the eyes of the imams, that way lies heresy and perdition. The painters are torn between artistic envy and their religious convictions.

Then a miniaturist, working on a book specially commissioned by the Sultan, is murdered. There are any number of suspects - from his rival-colleagues to the followers of a fundamentalist cleric. Summoned to solve the mystery is Black, an erstwhile artist and clerk. Black accepts, in order to ingratiate himself with the father of his beloved, Shekure. Black is a fool for love, but Shekure is a single mother living at the mercy of a patriarchal society. She has no intention of yoking her family’s fortunes to Black without carefully hedging her bets.

The book is gratifying, both as historical fiction as well as an intelligently crafted mystery. It proceeds at a leisurely stroll, and with the frequent scenic detours down the by lanes of Ottoman art, history, culture and philosophy, it is often an aesthetic delight, with many passages of surpassing beauty. The plot has mystery’s requisite tension, and the conclusion is satisfactory, if not highly suspenseful.

Where it falters is in setting and characterization. I would have expected more color and richer detail in descriptions of sixteenth century Istanbul, one of the most storied cities in the world. More disappointing is the characterization. It has the same flaws that may be leveled at miniature painting – lack of depth and perspective. The story is told through multiple viewpoints, but the characters frequently contradict themselves and indulge in so much double speak, that we have no idea who they are, or what they believe. They remain mostly a strange, amorphous bunch. The prevailing mood of characterization is an unabashed homoeroticism. Not a single youth escapes having an adoring adjective – ‘pretty’, ‘lovely’, ‘beautiful’- affixed to his person. The problem with a literary world where every male is assumed to be just a little bit gay is that it is at best a lop-sided, and at worst a falsified view of human nature. Literature becomes less Art and more artifice.

Turkey has long been at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and its struggle with cultural identity is evident in the novel. That is to say, Pamuk portrays it but seems unable to reconcile the differences. What the book offers is an exclusively Islamic worldview that fails to reaffirm the import of one of its most inspiring lines:

“Nothing is pure…To God belongs the East and the West. May he protect us from the will of the pure and the unadulterated.”

To A Mountain In Tibet by Colin Thubron

Rating: 4 & 1/2 Stars

Colin Thubron does not indulge in the sort of travel spiels intended to lure in unsuspecting vacationers. For example, reading ‘To a Mountain in Tibet’ is hardly likely to send anyone careening up the Himalayan slopes with the idea that a jaunt to Tibet would be just the ticket. At no point does he understate the remoteness and inaccessibility of this land. That would leave the armchair traveler wondering as to the mysterious allure of mountains. What is it that men seek there that they can’t find elsewhere? Adventure, perhaps? Or, maybe, is it the desire for solitude, a quest for the meaning of life, or, a chance to confront one’s own mortality?

Thubron is too reticent and subtle a writer to offer us any facile explanations.  We do learn a few things, however. Thubron is in bereavement over the recent demise of his mother. He had lost his father several years earlier, and his sister had died in a tragic accident at the age of twenty-one. That leaves him now the sole survivor of his family, an unenviable position for anyone to be in. Rather than a mere description of exotic people and places, this is a meditation on family, love, loss, and, grief. 

You cannot walk out on your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it’s my profession, after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end you come to rest at a mountain that is holy to others.

The book is not all philosophizing, by any means. The mountain in question is Mount Kailas, sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, and the Bon religion of Tibet. The route taken is through the Karnali valley in Nepal, with Thubron being accompanied by three Sherpa who serve as guide, cook, and porter. The author tells us about the lives of the various ethnic groups inhabiting the regions he passes through. He treads lightly on the geopolitics of the region, though he does not shy away from bleak references to the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to obliterate Tibetan identity. The picture we get of the country’s urbanized landscape is an unattractive, homogenized drabness.

So much for the shabby towns; yet, his prose is exquisite when he speaks of the natural backdrop of his travels. His limning of plant, animal and mineral life is delicate as feather strokes, leaving echoes of beauty in the memory. Whether he’s describing the pristine loveliness of Lake Manasarovar, or the stark majesty of Kailas, we’re awe-struck at the splendor that still graces our ravaged planet.

Though he does debunk a lot of the myths that shroud this land of legendary mysticism, he also listens to and narrates fabulous tales of miracle and wonder, as in perhaps, his wistful reference to the lamas of the ‘rainbow body’. This refers to the passing away of an enlightened lama, who upon the death of his corporeal body, dematerializes in a spray of iridescent light. Thubron is well-read in the Eastern faiths, but throughout the book, he wavers between the scholar’s instinctive skepticism, and the lonely wanderer’s yearning to believe. Even as he accomplishes his goal of completing the kora - the circumambulation of Mt. Kailas - he wonders at the thin line that delineates superstition from faith.

He had me wondering too.  It seems to me that doubt is a precious gift, no less so than belief; the un-dissuaded pilgrim is enriched by both. Tentatively, I would suggest that superstition is the groping in the dark, immured in the blindness of our own mind. As for faith…it must be that which can discern the Rainbow Body.

Shadow of the Silk Road

Rating: 4 Stars

In ‘Shadow of the Silk Road’, Colin Thubron retraces the route of the historic Silk Road, starting from China and wending his way through Tibet, the fractured republics of Central Asia, through Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Thubron’s prose is elegant and evocative in its unsentimental, yet compassionate telling of lands and people rendered remote by geography and cultural divides.

What I found particularly interesting was his exploration of the historic intermingling of various ethnicities, and the consequent racial anomalies that exist to this day, especially apparent in China and Central Asia.

The ruthless ambitions of early empire-builders are echoed in the brutal regimes of modern-day despots. There is little to rejoice in as we hear the grim accounts of lives shattered by war, ancient bigotries kept fervently alive, and dreams crushed underfoot by religious fanaticism, or authoritarian suppression.

Nevertheless, the book is oddly luminous. All along this silken swathe, despite the differences of customs and cultures, the common humanity of these impoverished people shines evident – be it in their aspirations for a better life, for freedom from persecution, for peace, for dignity; or in their hospitality to a wanderer who experiences first hand the kindness of strangers.

An eye-opener for those (like me) who, misguided by the media, would write off this Eurasian melting-pot as nothing more than a seething cauldron of religious fundamentalism.

This fascinating and erudite travelogue will delight alike lovers of history and archaeology, as well as those who merely revel in fine writing.