NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH (Vintage International)

This book is certainly worthy of the Booker. It is essentially a wartime story of love, focussing on the many aspects of war and love thereby revealing how one becomes the other (e.g., when Dorrigo discovers that Amy is alive but fights not to reach her, or she him). The imagery used in the descriptions of the POWs on the Death Railway construction is very vivid and haunting, leaving the reader shocked at both the tragedy of humanity as well as its will to survive in the the most unbelievable torture. A striking feature of this masterpiece is that it focuses on the individual lives of the POWs and the Japanese commanders after the war, knitting it all together in the tragic love of Dorrigo and Amy. Their acceptance of the status quo echoes the tragedy of the Japanese society to accept, unquestionably, the will of their Emperor. Just as the Nakamura does not, even for a moment, entertain the thought that possibly the Japanese spirit is misguided, similarly Dorrigo and Amy refuse to accept how desperately one seeks union with the other. The book is achronological- shuffling back and forth in principally three time domains : Before the War (Dorrigo and Amy are in focus here), During the War (the lives of the POWs), and After the War (the remnants of the POWs lives). The language is rich with expressions defining its prose structure on poetry; each of the five parts of this book start with a haiku by either Basho or Issa. Poetry becomes the life of the good (Dorrigo), the evil (Kota), the good-evil (Nakamura), so much so that each of them have their deaths in poetry, one way or another. Conclusion: Do read this book. Not only does it acquaint you with a forgotten tragedy of World War II but also draws on the important themes of love, megalomania, death, and oblivion.

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Excellent

Opened new perception

Dorrigo Evans is a doctor by profession, life-saver by compulsion. He took the Hippocratic Oath a little too seriously so as to consider it a face; a face that drapes his skin loosely but does never fit quite right. In turn, it makes him feel uneasy. Makes him feel that maybe he isn't how everyone likes him to be. He doesn't match their description. He might as well be the opposite of it. But still, to his surprise, he couldn't open up his grim thoughts. As if he was bound to act in a certain way. Society is a machine and he is the slave that sways with the chain attached to it. Then she came. The girl with a red flower in her hair. Amy was it? Dorrigo sensed a new presence. The presence of something new. Something that cast him out of his shell and filled him up with a new hope. But it didn't stay. In the end it all became just memories of good times and he proceeded to the plot. The great plot of World War II. "The Speedo meant that there were no longer rest days, that work quotas went up, and up again, that shifts grew longer and longer. The Speedo dissolved an already vague distinction between the fit and the sick into a vaguer distinction between the sick and the dying, and because of the Speedo more and more often prisoners were ordered to work not one but two shifts, both day and night." He became the leader. The leader of them all, the prisoners who knew only two destinations in their lives: life with strenuous work, or death by gangrene/cholera/deficiency disorders. He sacrificed (though he didn't wish he had) his own food for the sake of his subordinates. But still it wasn't any better. He couldn't save enough of them at the end of it. And whoever came out alive out of it all didn't find a life back home. Everything they knew and believed were gone and replaced. In the end, Dorrigo couldn't save any of them. But what changes the dynamics of this novel is that Richard Flanagan defocuses out of Evans whenever he feels right and shifts gaze towards the little Land of the Rising Sun. Although his protagonist has chosen (or rather was chosen) to face Japan at the war front, still the author managed to stay neutral. He didn't choose any side but just conducted a thorough description of the historical details. And what do we meet while he takes the narrow road to the deep north? A sad feeling of emptiness.

The book tells the story of Dorigo Evans, an Australian POW and a surgeon by trade during WW2. The core of the story is about Dorigo's work in a POW camp working on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs, slaves and forced labourers in service of Imperial Japan's designs for a great empire during WW2. The cruelty, torture, suffering and deprivation experienced by the various men who were put to work on the project is closely examined in this book. The railway was deemed strategically important by Japan in order for the establishment of empire east of Thailand, Burma and to eventually take on the British in India. The narrative isn't told exclusively through Dorigo Evans' point of view. We see various events as they unfold through the Australian POWs, the Japanese officers and their subordinates, the Korean guards serving the Japanese army, and various other characters. The story describes the horrific conditions of the POW camps. Starvation, disease and death were commonplace due to the lack of food and medicines. There is also a love story that forms one of the narrative strands and closely examines the effects of war and harrowing experiences that shapes the lives of the survivors and the many shattered lives that it leaves in it's wake. The events in the book are based on recorded history and events described are based on fact. The novel doesn’t exonerate the war criminals, but it forces us to admit that history conspired to place them in a situation where cruelty would thrive as it invariably does during times of war, where the powerful wield unbridled power over the powerless. The quality of the prose is haunting and very fluid and will remain with the reader for a long while after. The narrative flits between past and present to examine the lives of the survivors from the POW camps, their Japanese masters and the families who lost sons, husbands and fathers who never returned home and how the men who did return were forever traumatized by the the horrors of war.

When I turned the final page, I was relieved and sad at the same instant; relieved to have finally let the fates of POWs take wings to better skies and sad to not be living an alternate life, altogether. This exquisite work of Flanagan is so terrifyingly beautiful that it redefined both the words for me. I was surprised to find my mind working at two levels. One drew shudders; the ulcerated limbs, the beri-beri attacks, the cholera ridden bodies, the visceral lashes, the s***ty camps, the fatal frostbites.. they were so difficult to imagine that I found myself keeping the book away several times to just get my hands and mind steady. To think that those things happened, is one pain; to have someone narrate it in the most vivid way, is another. Its a lot to take, even as a passive reader. However the other drew comfort; keeping relationships, dancing madly, forging friendships, sharing heartbreaks, fighting trivial, crying together, helping gladly, nurturing hope, living another life, elsewhere, far away. When life is killed everyday yet one wishes to live and when hope is crushed every hour yet one continues to hope, we see the greatest example of human courage. That courage, is placed amidst the sheets of this book.

I struggled a bit to get into it for the first 50 pages, but then starts the POW's camp story which held my interest in the book. The story of the POW's is heart wrenching and gives an insight of difficulties faced by people during war. The lives of similar people in the aftermath of the war were also beautifully articulated. Totally a great read!