The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Winner of Man Booker Prize 2014 | Award-Winning Literary Fiction Novel | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literature Enthusiasts

I cannot find the right word, or even collection of words, to describe Richard Flanagan's THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH - it is more than "moving," more than "gut-wrenching," more than "provocative," more than "beautiful." All I can really say is that it is a more than worthy winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize. And if you are looking for a book that will wring every possible emotion out of you, a book that will not only make you feel but teach you anew the depths to which a story can induce you to feel, this is that book. In fact, I don't say this very often, but this is one of those rare and precious books that I believe everyone in the world should read, especially Australians. As Flanagan says, "A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul."Focusing on a surgeon, officer, and reluctant war hero called Dorrigo Evans in order to describe the experiences of both Australian POWs and Japanese army servicemen in the construction of the Thai-Burma "Death Railway" in 1943, it may seem that it goes without saying that this book is not for the faint-hearted, but that is quite a considerable understatement. So much cruelty, so much pain, so much soul-destroying sadness. There is a particular surgical scene that left me shattered. The author must have had nerves of steel to write this book and a truly driving passion to tell this story. Yet I keep coming back to the thought: As hard as it must have been to write, and as hard as it is to read, how much harder must it have been to live? This story is devastating. Devastating. Yet it is also beautiful - terrible and beautiful - thanks to Flanagan's mastery of his craft. There is a certain "call-a-spade-a-spade" pragmatism and forthrightness that is part of the Australian psyche, and this is a constant presence in Flanagan's writing, yet at the same time, the style, language, word usage, and even cadence of his prose is so pure and exquisite that it rivals that of any nationality and even any era. He is a maestro whose art would be among the greats of any time or place.THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH has a loose structure that is ostensibly based on an elderly Dorrigo reminiscing about his time in the POW camp and the people he knew there, although the book goes off on a few other tangents as well. This device of looking back over a life makes the story feel very fragmented but beautifully so - it is comprised of fragments of great beauty, great pain, and great ordinariness. Thus, in a chronological sense, the story jumps and skitters from one place to another, and Dorrigo constantly belabors the point that he is the most unreliable of narrators. All this is true. This is not a book about the Death Railway, it is a book about people's experiences and memories of the Death Railway and how they live with it. As Dorrigo says, "A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else."Occasionally we are told about a prisoner's long future life, but rather than feeling cheated of seeing their story through to the end, I felt the opposite: that this book was not about what happened to the characters in the end, it was about a single thing, the one thing that affected them all. Australian or Japanese, male POW or female lover left behind to fret, they all experienced the Death Railway; and the point is not whether they survived it or not, the point is that they were all there. In this book, there are melancholy accounts of what came after, because they show the futility and sheer bloody wastefulness of what came before. And always in the background is the whispered refrain: "Lest we forget."Its characterization is one of the book's greatest strengths. Dorrigo hates being viewed as a war hero and says that: "One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all." And so, there is a sense that Dorrigo's warring emotions of vanity and self-loathing make him turn outward to study other people in a way that provides poignant and fundamental insights into their souls. Or perhaps he has just always been enthralled by people and their uniqueness. Either way, this book is nothing so much as a cavalcade of individual lives and personalities, and the infinite shades of gray they personify.However, despite his attempts to focus on others, or perhaps because of them, Dorrigo himself is the most deeply realized character in the book. He is also an exquisite study in survivor's guilt: "He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying ..." During his time in the camp, as his company's officer as well as surgeon, Dorrigo both found himself and came to hate himself, as so many perfectionists do. "Dorrigo Evans understood himself as a weak man who was entitled to nothing, a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man. It defied sense. They were captives of the Japanese and he was the prisoner of their hope." Despite the pressure and duty placed on him by his men, he would "... come to love them, and every day he understands that he is failing in his love, for every day more and more of them die." Yet, "He refused to stop trying to help them live. He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying."Dorrigo is forever searching for what makes a person fully human, and he is very much afraid that the perfect mixture of suffering, brutality, and madness found on the Death Railway represents the only time in which man realized his full humanity. This story contains one character in particular, Colonel Kota, who is straight out of the most evil of nightmares. A coolly sadistic, matter-of-fact psychopath, he is a character I will not easily forget, if I ever do: "Colonel Kota knew he was in the power of something demented, inhuman, that had left a trail of endings through Asia. And the more he killed, so casually, so joyfully, the more he realised his own ending would be the one death beyond his own control. To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life."The sort of character development and depth that takes most authors an entire book to achieve, if they're lucky, Flanagan pulls off in the smallest vignettes, sometimes in just a handful of pages. And it says something about the author's greatness that in this book that is brimming with the vilest hate and prejudice, there is absolutely no bias in the terrible beauty he wrings out of each character, from Dorrigo Evans to Colonel Kota, from Amy Mulvaney to Rooster MacNeice, from "the Goanna" to Darky Gardiner. It is abundantly clear that each in turn has received the author's heart and soul, and most likely blood, sweat, and tears, too.Probably the greatest mistake a reader of THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH can make is to think they know what to expect from it. This very serious-minded book has occasional pieces of sly, wry, ironic humor that are mildly startling for their cropping up in the midst of much graver musings. In the middle of his own self-deprecation, for example, Dorrigo suddenly points out that: "He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf." The laconic Australian humor of the "diggers" (Australian soldiers) crackles and sparkles in exquisite one-liners. For some reason, a simple sentence like this really tickled my funny bone: "It's a good plan, Wat, said Chum Fagan. Only it isn't." And who would not smile at a description like this: "He had the presence of a precarious telegraph pole."Something else I never expected to find in the pages of this book was a love affair that was so organic, conflicted, full of confusion and passion and doubt that it was all too devastatingly authentic. The word that most often springs to my mind in relation to THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH is "real," and Amy Mulvaney and Dorrigo's mad, irresistible, forbidden love is as real as love ever gets. It is also pleasing to find that there is room given in this all-inclusive tale to the women who loved the men we meet in the POW camp, and to the ways in which their hearts broke every bit as painfully and completely as the men's did. And it occurs to me that the path of this story is littered with hearts that have broken not for themselves but for others. There is a strong theme in this book that we can bear whatever happens to us, but what breaks us is seeing it happen to others and being powerless to prevent it.And so, there is, of course, no escaping the fact that the heart of this story is the horror, suffering, and death that stalked the POW camp that supplied the slave labor expended so heedlessly on the construction of the impossible Thai-Burma Railway in the Second World War. These pages are littered with so much death that each incident is included as just one more sentence in the narrative - after all, if every death was given the lamentation it deserved, the book would never end. We have only to encounter and pass over it in a book; the truly sobering thought, of course, is that men just like the ones in this book lived through the reality of it. "Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not."The story is very effective at portraying the gradual but inexorable breaking down of the POWs' spirit, moving them from defiant larrikinism to every individual conserving their own food and their own strength, yet still looking out for their comrades in suffering. "Starvation stalked the Australians. It hid in each man's every act and every thought. Against it they could proffer only their Australian wisdom which was really no more than opinions emptier than their bellies. They tried to hold together with their Australian dryness and their Australian curses, their Australian memories and their Australian mateship. But suddenly Australia meant little against lice and hunger and beri-beri, against thieving and beatings and yet ever more slave labour." In the end, "... they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek ..." Yet they still knew that their only hope of salvation was in unity: "... courage, survival, love - all these things didn't live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves."THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH is realistic fiction based very much on actual events, and as I read of the events of 1946 and later, I was struck forcibly with how closely this work of realistic, historical fiction resembles the best the literary world has to offer in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. At no point in this book does the reader have their hand held or their feelings spared, and the stories of what happened to the survivors of the Death Railway is no exception. When someone returns home from Hell, there can be no happily ever after.This book surprised me at every turn, perhaps none more so than in its narration of the war crimes trials of the Japanese after the war. This material raises some very uncomfortable questions: If the Japanese culture was so different from Western culture that they were literally incapable of seeing their actions toward the POWs as wrong, much less criminal, how culpable were they? If the Japanese army brutalized its own people as a right and proper part of their training, how could these men see brutality meted out to prisoners as wrong? "The punishment wasn't about guilt but honour. There was no choice in any of this: one existed for the Emperor and for the railway - which was, after all, the embodiment of the Emperor's will - or one had no reason to live or even die." Did the fact that the Japanese saw suicide as the only honorable response to being captured, and those who did not respond in this way as without honor and therefore sub-human, mitigate their crimes at all? Major Nakamura gives this perspective with disconcerting frankness: "What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railways, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. If he, a Japanese officer, allowed himself to be captured, he would be executed on his ultimate return to the home islands anyway." Is it true that the greatest monsters, like Colonel Kota, were set free because they were Japanese nobility, while lowly Koreans and Formosans who served in the Japanese army were scapegoated? "If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor's will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the Americans support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor's tools?" Flanagan worries at the truth of such questions with the same relentless tenacity he applies to every other aspect of this extraordinarily brave, bold book.It wasn't until I had almost finished reading THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH that I was able to admit to myself that with a few notable exceptions, the parts of the story that had moved me most and would likely stay with me most clearly afterward were those told from the Japanese point of view. As an Australian myself, it was an intensely uncomfortable feeling to realize that the characters and stories I was most drawn to were Japanese. However, when I say that they moved me and drew me in, for the most part, I do not mean that they elicited positive feelings in me. Colonel Kota usually provoked intense hatred in me, as did "the Goanna," and Tenji Nakamura usually left me profoundly uncomfortable and confused. Yet for my whole life, I've heard of the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese against the Australians on the Death Railway, and I have never been able to even begin to understand how the Japanese could justify their actions to themselves. This is the first story I have ever read that was able to begin to explain this to me, and that may be one of the most special things about this extraordinary book.Even though it makes me feel unclean to say so, in a small handful of places in this narrative, I felt the tiniest glimmer of pity for the Japanese characters as victims of an insane culture of hero worship and everyday brutality that very deliberately stifled such feelings as empathy and compassion, and molded men into monsters. "Too much was made of killing, thought Nakamura. Maybe one should feel remorse, guilt, and at first in Manchukuo he had. But the dead soon ceased to be faces. He struggled to remember any of them. The dead are dead, he thought, and that's it." Choi Sang-min, whom the Australians called "the Goanna," gives the perspective of a Korean forced into the lowly position of a guard in the POW camp: "... when he was a guard, he lived like an animal, he behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be."Major Nakamura perfectly illustrates what the Japanese mindset was, a mindset so completely incomprehensible to Australians then or now: "Nakamura had shed the blood of others and would willingly have shed his own. He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. For he loved poetry above all, and the Emperor was a poem of one word - perhaps, he thought, the greatest poem - a poem that encompassed the universe and transcended all morality and all suffering. And like all great art, it was beyond good and evil."The ending of the book is as perfectly real as everything that comes before it. It is as multi-layered as life, and I am grateful to have found a book and an author that understand such authenticity, especially at the end, where we find that: "People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only." A few of the layers are happy or at least peaceful; many are quietly tragic; some are unresolved; many are full of regret. Because life is like that. And so is death.This powerful, sensitive and evocative novel on the human condition, in extremis, which was recommended by a fellow Amazon reviewer (not to mention Man Booker), helped me reconnect with Australian literature after an absence of several decades. I had read a substantial amount of Aussie literature, back when down under beckoned as a viable alternative. Yet my knowledge was stuck in the days when “everyone” was reading Patrick White’s This novel by Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Booker Prize, and with such brilliant prose and a complex tale it is no wonder. Born in Tasmania so Flanagan has always received much praise for all his books, but surely with this he has even surpassed himself.The title for this book is literally a translation from the Japanese of Oku no Hosomichi, and each section of this novel starts with a piece of Japanese poetry, which as you read you will see is relevant to the following part. The main character here, Dorrigo Evans in his old age has found public recognition and fame, for his surgical work and his being a Second World War veteran. But Dorrigo, who has trouble staying loyal to one woman at a time, and who has an affair with his aunt earlier on in this book looks upon himself as a failure. As he looks back and we are taken to certain periods in his life so we read of his and the experiences of others, making this slightly complex in its vision, but with all the parts coming together neatly to form something which is very thoughtful in its total.The influence for this book is because Flanagan’s own father was a PoW of the Japanese and was one of the many who were forced to work on the Burma Railway, or the Death Railway, as so many were to discover. As we read this tale then we experience the horrors of so many who found themselves slave labour for the Japanese war machine as it tried to build an empire throughout south east Asia. If this had been just about the main character, Dorrigo this would have been very good, but by bringing in other characters and seeing how they react and think so this becomes sublime. For many today as we look back at what the Japanese did we can only express horror and disgust as what we consider to be pure evil, but of course to the Japanese this wasn’t so.As we see here, a clash of cultures can bring a rude awakening to many, because with soldiers who were brought up to believe in Bushido the actions of the Australians can be seen as beneath contempt and so they were treated like vermin. To surrender to your enemy was seen as cowardice and disgrace by the other side, but then because some were officers, they were treated slightly different, because although they were beneath contempt, they held a certain hierarchical position. For Dorrigo then, due to his rank he does not have to work with the common soldiers, and because of his medical experiences runs the hospital at the camp, and also has the unenvious task of saying who is fit enough to do the gruelling work, and those who are at the most immediate risk from dying if they do so. With the problems caused by the current virus throughout the world we see the same where doctors have to determine who is likely to survive ventilators and those who won’t.With such a task for our main character he can only see himself as a failure because people died, but of course to others he is seen as a hero due to his humanitarian actions and trying to save as many soldiers as possible. This book then makes us think about and ask what is evil and what are just flaws due to character, culture or of being human. This is of course once more prevalent in this country where we see all the arguing over things like statues and whether certain ones should be removed, as people are not thinking about things properly. We cannot go on blaming others for things where the culture and thinking is or was completely different, you just end up going around in circles. You have to understand if you want to move on, otherwise you will just keep going around in circles. This is then a book that will make you think and try to understand people and movements a bit better and is a great choice for a reading group as it has so much to offer for discussion.Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer, and his novel, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", won the Man Booker literary prize in 2014. Flanagan is from Sydney and joins a distinguished list of Australian novelists, including Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally, to have won this coveted award."The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is broadly based on the experiences of Richard Flanagan’s father as a POW working on the so-called “death railway” - the line that ran from Burma to Thailand - during WW2. The unspeakable horrors of this Japanese construction project are well known to many Australians, past and present, through experience, literature, and legend.It could be seen that the novel is one of unremitting horror, suffering and inescapable death. However, one commentator has said that: “Acts of terrifying violence and appalling humiliation are suddenly illumined by slivers of hope - expressed by the naked, skeletal prisoners in acts of unexpected generosity (the sharing of a rice ball or a joke) - and a central love story.”The story of the novel is not without love and hope. Flanagan says that he had to find “a story from hope, and love is the greatest expression of hope. Love is the discovery of eternity in a moment that dies immediately.” He quotes the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in saying: “Hope is the cruellest of torments because it prolongs human suffering, but it is also the engine of us. Without it we die.”The love element is provided by a tale that Flanagan heard about a Latvian man who scoured the earth in search of his wife at the end of the war. Moving to Tasmania (the island and southernmost state of Australia), the Latvian later caught sight of the woman in Sydney, a child holding each of her hands. This was a moment of decision. Gripping stuff!Richard Flanagan is a writer with a social and political consciousness - his opposition being centred on policies, not people. This is also evident in the book. A quote from one reviewer of Flanagan’s novel seems to encapsulate the ideas behind both the prize-winning book and Richard Flanagan’s philosophy of life: “I get more optimistic as I get older. If you choose to take your compass from power, in the end you find only despair. But if you look around the world you can see and touch - the everyday world that is too easily dismissed as everyday - you see largeness, generosity, hope, change for the better. It’s always small but it’s real.”."The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is a testimony to this view of life. Not only is Richard Flanagan a prize-winning writer; he is also a notable modern philosopher. Read the novel; appreciate his personal philosophy of life; learn from these slivers of life, hope, and love in a cruel world.A little perseverance is required here as it takes fifty or so pages before you fully engage. I almost gave up. What a loss that would have been! Gradually the story becomes a vortex from which there is no escape. Emotions are stretched, both by the lead character's somewhat bland personal life and then by the bloodcurdling scenes from the Japanese POW camp. Richard Flanagan does not spare his reader with vivid and harrowing scenes in the second half of the book in what is a major example of storytelling and superb writing .It is everything the positive preceding reviewers claim.This isn't an easy read; any story involving prisoners of war and the inhumanity of one human being to another is never going to be frivolous or entertaining. But this is an incredibly powerful tale which examines human endurance in the most extreme and exceptional circumstances. Dorrigo, a POW is a complex and ultimately haunted individual, shaped and changed by wartime experience. The camp commander, Nakamura is flawed, but is he bad? And how does he survive?This is a book I started a couple of times and found difficult to engage with; but maybe my timing was wrong. I've recently returned to it and found it a complex, thought provoking and ultimately rewarding read. It's challenging in part, but Flanagan took me to the depths of a Burmese jungle and the horrors experienced then threw me out to reflect. I can see why this was a Booker winner.Firstly, this was a Kindle Daily deal and for the price was a super bargain. From films, I had a vague idea of the second world war- in south east Asia. I now have a much better comprehension.This was a truly horrific account of man’s inhumanity to man in the Japanese P.O.W. camps, during the construction of the railway in Siam, towards the end of the war. The storyline is relentless in it's depiction of the cruelty and misery the Australian captive soldiers endured at the hands of the Japanese. There’s no joy or happiness and the damage caused to various individuals, by the atrocities, carries on into their later lives- for those who lived through the ordeals.The style of writing is unusual but shouldn’t be criticised as it adds to the impact. This is a very sad story. The author doesn’t skim over the facts and I was left with a feeling of sorrow.Not an easy book to read but certainly not to be missed.