The Narrow Road to the Deep North
I have just finished reading Richard Flanagan's latest novel, 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' and thought I would write a few lines about it, while it's fresh on my mind. What follows is not so much a review as a few thoughts and observations. Flanagan knows how to write about suffering, and sometimes this is not easy to read. For example, in this novel, the Australian POWs (Prisoners of War) are deep in the Siam jungle, building an impossible railway as part of the Japanese war effort. In one scene, a character named 'Darky Gardiner' (on account of his Aboriginal heritage, we discover late in the novel) is beaten relentlessly and without reason, already a broken man, dragged from the hospital to appease some loss of face between the commandant and a visiting official. The commander, Nakamura, has left the scene but comes back, surprised that the beating continues in the dark (he hasn't ordered it to stop), '[Darky] ... no longer looked like a man, but something wrong and unnatural' (p.308). What is most affecting here is the simplicity of the understatement, coming after some pages of a description of the scene from a variety of points of view.
The fact that the commander cites poetry should not be surprising; at one point the central protagonist understands and to a degree admires the 'terrible will of Nakamura' (p.304). I was reminded at such points of Gould's Book of Fish, another story of immense suffering, this time in Australia's colonial past, at Sarah Island (a penal colony). In what could be described as a Marquez-like leaping of ideas, the Commandant seeks to transform Sarah Island into a New Europe, which includes the development of a railway. The obsession with will and empire are points of comparison in these two very different novels: "'time! dear Surgeon is what our Nation does not have!' because now in his mind His Destiny & that of His Nation were one & the same ..." (Goulds ..., p.204)
In a different way, I was also reminded of Death of a River Guide in the clever management of time in this novel. Whereas the past and present scenes wash over a drowning man and the stories he recalls are generational, in The Narrow Road North, Flanagan centres around the life of the central Australian protagonist, Dorrigo Evans, from the perspective of old age, to memories of his Tasmanian childhood, to the bitter days of his strange heroism as a surgeon and leader on the Thai-Burma death railway. There is a danger in writing about such a man as Dorrigo Evans that he could become too heroic, or too prophet-like in his leadership of other man. Flanagan avoids this trap by making the character self-conscious of his 'act' (and confession of really being a bastard, deep down) and through the depiction of him as a womaniser with a long-suffering wife. The stories of his surgical success and adulation in life are not really the point of the novel and so much here is unexplained; the truth is reserved for the moments at the centre of the novel where he embodies the sort of Australian spirit which in war is deeply mythical and yet (it seems) embodied in such men. Like Death of a River Guide, the Tasmanian colonial stories reach well into the 20th century, and continue to affect and shape such men.
I haven't mentioned the love story at the heart of the novel, or the Japanese scenes, or the possible faults of the novel (if there are some). Towards the end, as Dorrigo faces his fate, the sense of the past we have witnessed in the novel rushing forward into the future is palpable and profound, and I (for one) read the novel with a sense that Flanagan once again has managed to write something of cultural and historical significance. Here's such a paragraph from towards the end of the book. The last words in this non-review go to the author:
He was in any case hurtling backwards into an ever fast swirling maelstrom of people, things, places, backwards and round and deeper and deeper and deeper into that growing, grieving, dancing story of things forgotten or half-remembered, stories, lines of poetry, faces, gestures misunderstood, love spurned, a red camellia, a man weeping, a wooden church hall, women, a light he had stolen from the sun ...(p.463).
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