The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Hardcover, 464 pages

English language

Published Dec. 24, 2014 by Chatto & Windus.

ISBN:: 978-0-7011-8905-1
OCLC Number:: 879398724

(1 review)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife.

Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II.

In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Source

2 editions

Ashwin reviewed The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Review of 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north/)

A world of dew,
And in every dewdrop,
A world of sorrow.
— Issa

Elegiac haiku and poem snippets like these pepper the dark pages of the WW2 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Written by Australian author Richard Flanagan, the story is centered around a group of Australian prisoners of war (POW) and their Japanese captors, while they worked on the Death Railway and the resulting mental trauma on them after the war.

The Thailand-Burma railway line which cuts through dense tropical jungle was miraculously completed in just one year by the Japanese army using POWs and coolies as slave labour. The line is infamously named so for the heavy death count it extracted due to cholera, hunger, torture and atrocities: ~100,000 South-East Asian coolies and ~10,000 British/Australian POWs. Many of the Japanese and Korean captors who committed these horrendous …

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north/)

A world of dew,
And in every dewdrop,
A world of sorrow.
— Issa

Elegiac haiku and poem snippets like these pepper the dark pages of the WW2 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Written by Australian author Richard Flanagan, the story is centered around a group of Australian prisoners of war (POW) and their Japanese captors, while they worked on the Death Railway and the resulting mental trauma on them after the war.

The Thailand-Burma railway line which cuts through dense tropical jungle was miraculously completed in just one year by the Japanese army using POWs and coolies as slave labour. The line is infamously named so for the heavy death count it extracted due to cholera, hunger, torture and atrocities: ~100,000 South-East Asian coolies and ~10,000 British/Australian POWs. Many of the Japanese and Korean captors who committed these horrendous acts were tried for war crimes after the war.

The book is roughly divided into three parts, covering the before, during and after lives of POW Dorrigo Evans, his Japanese captor Nakamura and other characters from a camp on the Death Railway. The story builds up to the dreadful happenings of a single day on The Line and its effects on those present there. There are many simplified movies and works (like Bridge on River Kwai) made about The Line. Thankfully, the characters in this book are complex, flawed and feel real. Dorrigo is a Tasmanian, who caught up in the eddies of life, ends up as an Army surgeon POW and is forced by circumstances to lead his men. Steeped in their Emperor’s propaganda and the supremacy of their race, normal Japanese people like Nakamura are brainwashed to effect unthinkable atrocities on their prisoners. The crushing defeat and the destruction of Japan by atomic bombs, takes a depressing toll on the Japanese survivors. On the other hand, the POWs, though celebrated as war heroes, never quite escape their traumatic experiences and struggle to adjust back in normal society.

Going into the book, I was a tad afraid that the torturous subject of The Line would be milked for maximum drama. Not so. Filled with flashbacks and flashforwards, what takes center stage is the pre- and post-lives of the main actors. The damp mood in the passages is lifted by Dorrigo, a connoisseur of classic English poetry and his captors, who similarly relish in the haiku of Basho, Buson and Issa. The verses picked by Flanagan are truly exquisite and the book is worth reading just for the poetry itself.

I picked this book after reading a review in The Economist. Though it surely is not as heavenly as claimed there, I did love it! The story spans from the bush of Tasmania to Australia to Thailand and post-war Japan. The romance of Dorrigo and Amy is a bit cheesy, but it helps lighten the bleak pages and I kept rooting for them. The prose does get too flowery in places, where maybe Flanagan should have held back from using his thesaurus.

Flanagan’s father was a POW on The Line and that is a strong influence in this book and in the character Dorrigo. This work won the 2014 Man Booker, which it probably deserved. Much like Julian Barnes, another Man Booker winner (for 2011), playing with words comes easily to Flanagan and the quality of writing here is strong. This is a good book whose visual imagery and tragic characters are sure to remain etched in memory.