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’.

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough



Rating: 3 Stars

Colleen McCullough’s ‘The Thorn Birds’ is one of the biggest best-sellers to come out of Australia, that enjoyed even greater popularity in the 70’s after it was serialized for T.V.

The Cleary family – father Paddy, mother Fiona, and their brood of offspring - move from their native New Zealand to the not too distant shores of Australia at the invitation of Paddy’s wealthy elder sister - Mary Carson. They are for all intentions the heirs to Drogheda, Mary Carson’s sheep-ranch in New South Wales, and they learn to love the rough country that is their new home. Ten-year old Meggie Cleary, the only girl in the family, captures the benevolent attention of Father Ralph de Bricassart the handsome young Catholic priest of Gillanbone. Things get a little complicated as Meggie grows older. Bricassart is bothered both by Meggie’s virginal adoration of him, and his own changing feelings for her. Meggie’s dowager aunt, who also had her gimlet eye on Ralph, soon shows them the hellish fury of a woman scorned. Covering a span of more than half a century, the book is part romance, part family drama, past historical fiction.

What McCullough does well, she does very well indeed. She is excellent in the details: the minutiae of sheep-farming, cutting cane and life in the trenches of WW II add vibrant life to the story. McCullough’s Australia is a land that is at once harsh, yet beautiful, and her writing glides with the grace of a painter’s brush in its description of people, places, and abundant wild life.

Where she trips up is, perhaps, in characterization. This is a book teeming with people (700 pages requires a vast cast of characters), and some are depicted better than others. Considering that the star-crossed romance of Meggie and Ralph lies at the heart of the novel, the duo struck me as the weakest link. The relationship comes off as stilted and forced – an imitation of passion rather than the real thing. Ralph comes off as particularly flat and uninspiring.

What can I say? It just awakens my snarky side:

 when Meggie bemoans Ralph’s unwillingness to choose her over the Church – “(yawn) He’s a priest, you twit. Try to wrap your brain cells around that idea if you can.”

when Ralph risibly states that 'hundreds of women have wanted' him – “Yeah, right. I personally find it difficult to imagine the legions of women panting to defrock this man in black when he’s thrice described as (snigger) ‘flaccid’”

when the author shamelessly surrenders to her school-girl impulses, and pens innumerable fawning phrases on the awesome pulchritude of her protagonists - “Enough already! Handsome is as handsome does. Show me some character I can chew on!”

This is by no means a bad book. If only my inner critic would shut up, I would probably enjoy this type of novel more; but it won't and therefore I can't.

Anyway, my personal handicaps aside, many others did find this book entrancing. For no small reason is it ‘an international best seller’. Strong, long-suffering matriarchs; tragic irony; poetic justice; parallel situations; one too many cases of apples not falling too far from the tree; power; money; and, forbidden love  – it’s no epic, but it’s one heck of a multi-generational soap-operatic family saga, with surprisingly good writing to boot.



The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Rating: 4 Stars

‘The Secret River’ was not intended to be fiction. Author Kate Grenville was researching her own ancestry and the early settlers of Australia for a possible work of nonfiction when that idea germinated into something else. Many of Australia’s initial settlers did not come to that land voluntarily. They were, to put it euphemistically, His Majesty’s ‘guests’ – meaning that they had been prison convicts in England who were exiled to the remoter outposts of the British Empire for crimes ranging from poaching to piracy.

The Secret River’s protagonist William Thornhill lands in New South Wales in 1806 for committing larceny against his employer. He is luckier than many others in some respects. He arrives in the new land penniless, but with his spunky wife, Sal, into whose custody he is remanded for one year. Life for the Thornhills is difficult in the new land, but it wasn’t much easier in the old one either. Slowly, Thornhill realizes that he may achieve in the colony what would have been impossible back home. He is determined to shoulder his way into prosperity. There is only one obstacle – the country’s original inhabitants, who see no reason why they shoud ‘b..... off’ on any one’s say so.

There is between the Aboriginals and the white settlers a chasm of non-understanding that makes the eventual outcome as inevitable as it is tragic. The ‘good’ settlers treat the Aboriginals with condescension laced with unease. The ‘bad’ ones use the racial tension as a pretext to commit the worst kind of atrocities. However, Grenville’s sensitive treatment of the hostilities is even-handed. Habituated as they are to a hunter-gatherer existence, the Aboriginals seem maddeningly oblivious to the concept that the fruit of other men’s labors are not theirs for the taking; that in the eyes of the enraged farmers, that is theft. Yet, when violence erupts it’s a cruelly mismatched contest that cleaves our sympathy to one side.

Grenville makes the Australian wilderness come alive in the imagination with her luminous prose. Beautifully written, yet with a gritty rawness that makes no attempt to gloss over the harsh edges of reality. I would consider the book’s greatest strength its characterization. William Thornhill especially, is depicted with a compassion and depth similar to Pearl Buck’s Wang Lung. Whatever Thornhill may lack in wisdom or empathy, he makes up for with his doughtiness and dogged persistence. Like the Aboriginals, he too has nowhere else to go; and like them, he is also fighting for his own survival and that of his family.

“A man’s heart was a deep pocket he might turn out and be amazed at what he found there.”

The winner of the 2006 Commonwealth Prize, this is an evocatively written book of quiet passion. Territorial aggression and blood-letting are the unfortunate foundations of our shared history. While it may be impossible to set right the wrongs of the past, the least that can be done is remember that some have paid a heavy price for the success of others.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Rating: 4 Stars

2001 Booker Prize

The conventional hero’s job is a difficult one, yet the job description is fairly simple. At any rate, it involves the using of one’s abilities to challenge the oppressor, and uphold the rights of the underdog. By this definition do some outlaws pass into legend, as in the case of Ned Kelly. ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ is Peter Carey’s imaginative rendering of the life of Kelly, a figure as distinctly Australian as the didgeridoo, kangaroo, or kookaburra sitting on the old gum tree.

 

The story begins with the deportation of Kelly’s father from Ireland to Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania), one of Australia’s many penal settlements. The elder Kelly emerges from prison, vowing to never go back there again. That resolution is complicated by his marriage to Ellen Quinn, whose family is ever on the dodgy side of the law. His integrity genetically compromised, young Ned seems to find himself just once too often in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong company.

Initially reviled as a murderer and horse-thief, the tide of popular opinion turns in Kelly’s favor, and he wins public sympathy. His supporters are mostly underprivileged selectors who, like the Kelly family, are tired of having their lands seized and livestock impounded on trumped up charges, by a corrupt and vindictive legal system that was blatantly biased in favor of the wealthier land-holders.

“…And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood…In the hut at Faithfull’s Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed…”

Despite the title, this is not an accurate account of Kelly’s history, rather a fictionalized version of his life. One startling thing about the book is its jettisoning of grammatical diacritics. Without the reliable lifeline of well-placed commas and periods, the surprised reader is initially left flailing in the treacherous currents of Carey’s unpunctuated prose. It takes a certain chutzpah, but this a deliberate literary technique that smoothly echoes the character and tone of Ned Kelly’s historic Jerilderie Letter, his 8,000 word manifesto, outlining his grievances and demands. Lacking chapters, the book is divided into thirteen ‘parcels’, depicting the highlights of his life. As the narrator retelling his story to a daughter he may never see, Carey vividly recreates a Kelly who is both wily and artless; a reckless felon and a vulnerable boy; both semi-literate and eloquently persuasive.

The author could have probably dispensed with some of the fabricated insertions, such as the dysfunctional family situations that are ubiquitous features of the worst kind of talk-shows, and the most admired Greek tragedies. Carey does seem intent on drawing these parallels since he gives the poor dead outlaw an Oedipal streak a mile wide. Considering that Kelly is already a figure of mythical proportions in his native land, these embellishments seem uncalled for, as they don’t particularly add to the strength of the narrative. The ‘true history’ is riveting enough as it is.