From the beginning we nevertheless sense he’s an empty man, that he’s never found his place and knows on some profound level that he’s unworthy of the praise and awards that society continually bestows upon him. Dorrigo has had a successful, even glorious career.
The Narrow Road To the Deep North is the story of Dorrigo Evans, a 77-year old Australian doctor, and includes a handful other people crucial to his life: the woman Amy, Japanese officer Nakamura, and Dorrigo’s friend Darky Gardiner. Was it me? Did I just not ‘get’ it? Whatever the truth may be I cannot escape the impression that this is not award-winning literature… its part brilliant, part hackneyed and wholly in need of an editor. By the 130-page mark (out of 397pp) I was bewildered. For my part I was baffled by the paradigm shift from powerful war journal to campy love story. Nevertheless, the praise has piled high for The Narrow Road… it won the prestigious Man Booker Prize.
In Richard Flanagan’s prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which takes its title from a four centuries-old travel journal of Japanese haiku master Basho, I felt I was not only reading two different books, but the work of two different writers. Imagine reading a book that is both of these stories at once, toggling between these two scenarios and, what is most jarring, two styles of writing. The prose in that book coruscates with hyperbole even cartoonish in parts (“She wanted him, his muscles like little animals running across his back.”) Now, in counterpoint imagine reading a book about a frivolous Australian officer in the throes of a torrid affair with his uncle’s wife, two people who all but consume each other with lust, soaking up their passion in a short-lived dream of love before the woman’s husband returns. The narrative features a POV that alternates between the prisoners and the Japanese officers who beat them to death but who suffer greatly themselves too, blunting the edge that severs captor from slave.
In this book the prose is fierce, the work of a consummate storyteller, leaving out nothing in its nauseating detail. Imagine this hell and the story of a man trying to survive, to clutch on to his sanity as well as his life. Imagine the descriptions of cruelty, filth, starvation and beatings. Imagine reading a book describing the nightmare world of Australian POWs building a railroad through impossible mountains and sweltering, disease-haunted jungle. Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage Books, 2015) 416pp. Jeremy Simmons reviews the 2014 Booker Prize winner in light of its new edition.
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