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.

I had no words to thank Amazon this time.... Last times I got some books from Amazon but due to the bad packaging, I was soo disappointed..... Coming to the book... HARDCOVER The book is a gem 💎...... Magnificent... Please give it a read 📖

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.

A real look into what Australian POWs went through - some parts quite tough to read. Very well written. Would defiantly recommend.

A really enjoyable book although parts of it were quite disturbing especially the descriptions of deprevation and sickness. Also the brutality of the Japanese.

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 Voss (Penguin Classics) . White would go on to rightly win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. I’ve been to Australia three times, twice on the American government’s “dime.” And so I was amused when Flanagan had his protagonist, Dorrigo Evans attempting to escape from me (and my kind) since “Sydney was full of American GIs from Vietnam on R&R” (p. 364). Tut, tut. I really was not that unruly; my intentions were easily traced, searching for a mindset that, as Flanagan said much earlier in his novel, wouldn’t object to shocking the patrons of the hotel restaurant, which he said far less banally, and much more suggestively: “And wouldn’t that put some cream in their coffee.” War. Richard Flanagan was never in a war, nor was he apparently ever in the military. But his father was. His father was a prisoner of war who worked on the infamous “death railway” between Thailand (Siam) and Burma. And that experience is the core of this novel. He listened to his father well. And what is depicted is war, in extremis. Virtually no American (or Aussie!) had these experiences in Vietnam. And virtually no Allied troops had these experiences fighting Germany during the Second World War. It was a “perfect storm” of “honor,” “racism,” and the massive collision of the tectonic plates of empires. Flanagan brings all of that out so well. Japan, once so quiet, introspective, simply wanting to be left alone, was dragged onto “the world’s stage” in the 19th century, and assumed it role with a vengeance. The “white man” had no place in Asia. Japan would assume the role of providing “guidance” to the natives there. The last third of the novel is “epilogue,” what happened to the survivors of the Death Railroad after the war was over. Vengeance was dressed up in the robes of judicial proceedings. Nakamura, one of the leaders of the camps who managed to escape that vengeance/justice notes the irony: “they only prosecuted us for what we did to them, never what we did to the Chinese.” This is a novel in “high definition.” There are numerous crisp, searing images that will remain with me for the rest of my life. The structure of the novel, with the foreshadowing of events, and the interconnectivities that resulted from a country/continent which had a population that was less than some of today’s megalopolis, was brilliantly done. The title itself is taken from Matsuo Basho’s work of the same name, a link between the experiences of these two very different countries. And Flanagan’s prose is rich, meaningful, and almost perfectly wrought. Dominant is the theme of personal honor – often a good thing – run amok, to use a word now in English, which was derived from the language of Java, where Dorrigo Evans was captured. The Japanese were intent on building a railway because the white man said it could not be done, all for the glory of the emperor, their own version of the ancient pyramids, an analogy Flanagan makes several times. And there is also the disastrous consequences derived from the personal honor of the ever so mundane attempt to retain one’s own bodily functions. I’ll never be able to look at fish “captured” in an aquarium again, without thinking of this novel. As well as a major betrayal of ethics in the medical field: “Because he thought my white lab coat would help him.” And an issue that seems to unite the survivors of all wars: what to tell the families of the ones who didn’t make it, particularly if they died in futile or foolish circumstances: “What did you say? The right thing. Lies.” Flanagan uses the eternal truths of great literature, so it is no surprise that the homecoming of Ulysses is featured as part of a wedding toast. And medical failures haunt: the repeated grasping for a femoral artery that wasn’t there. It is also a novel about the missed opportunities in love. The book’s cover hints at that also, about a woman who had the “…audacity in wearing a big red flower in her hair…” in the bookstore. She became a haunting obsession. So… if you are going to Sydney… wear a crimson camellia in your hair, though a magnolia blossom might do, along with the pearls, and don’t “walk on by” on that iconic bridge, but stand hand-in-hand, and savor the time that is left. 6-stars.

This is the first novel by Richard Flanagan that I have read. I had been put off by knowing that the novel dealt with the prisoners of war working for the Japanese on the Thai-Burma railway line through the jungle. But, having decided to give it a go, I did not regret it. The novel is so much more than a novel about the cruelty and sadness of the treatment of the POWs. It is a wonderful love story. Dorrigo Evans is a wonderful strong and brave but very human character and the way that the author weaves together the stories of the hero from before the war, as a leader in the POW camp and after the war is beautifully done. We see the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers driving the Australian POWs to get the railway built but we are given little insights into their own humanity and frailty as well. The impact of the experience on the POWs, the Japanese solders and Dorrigo Evans himself provides the reader with a deeply emotional sense of the impact of the war on all the parties and there is a wonderful sense of redemption for Dorrigo Evans at the end. Richard Flanagan is a beautiful writer in the English language and this delightfully and sensitively crafted novel is a pleasure to read. I can't recommend it too highly.

One of the best book I have ever read. Painful, harrowing, beautiful story, utterly one of a kind. I hardly can wait to reread it if I will be capable to face it again. It is a profound experience.