Novel: The Narrow Road To The Deep North

A Novel Synopsis

The Narrow Road To The Deep North

By Richard Flanagan

The title of Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel comes from a 17th-century Japanese classic, a little book by the poet Basho that mixes a prose travel narrative with haiku in its account of a long journey on foot. Basho went north from present-­day Tokyo through a mountainous land of often shattering beauty. Yet his walk was marked by moments of terrible loneliness, and he seemed to travel under a kind of compulsion, without a defined goal or purpose. Basho walks because he must, and in reading him the old cliché comes alive: Life is a journey. Whether that journey has any meaning, whether there’s anything beyond putting one foot in front of the other . . . well, that’s another question entirely.

Flanagan’s Dorrigo Evans, a young medical officer, seems at first to travel a different path. His narrow road is a railway, and he labors too under a different compulsion, one that takes the shape of the Japanese Army. For Dorrigo — the name comes from a town in New South Wales — is a prisoner of war, among the more than 9,000 Australians who in 1943 slaved on what was called the “Death Railway.” A train line cut through the jungles of Burma and Thailand, that “Pharaonic project” killed nearly 100,000 of the Allied prisoners and impressed Asian laborers who were forced to build it. Flanagan’s own father was among the survivors, but the story told in this grave and lovely novel bears little resemblance to the one the French writer Pierre Boulle offered in the early 1950s in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai.” Both Boulle’s work and David Lean’s Oscar-winning film adaptation have long been challenged for their historical inaccuracy, and by my count Flanagan uses the word “Kwai” exactly twice. He has something much deeper than revisionism on his mind, though, something even deeper than his pungent account of the prisoners’ life on “the Line.”

Dorrigo will read the haiku poet Shisui, who to mark his own death took his brush and painted a circle. His favorite poem, however, is Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a dramatic monologue whose speaker is “a part of all that I have met” and yet believes that life’s meaning lies just beyond his grasp, in the worlds he has still to travel. Ulysses knows he has “become a name” for one who roams always “with a hungry heart.” No experience can satisfy him, no honors either, and so it will be for Dorrigo. Born in Tasmania, like Flanagan himself, he uses a scholarship to get himself to medical school and joins the army as World War II begins. His unit surrenders to the Japanese in Java, and in postwar Australia he will become famous for his work in the prison camp, for the leadership that ensures the survival of most of the men in his command. And he hates his fame — hates the idea of virtue in general and of his own in particular, hates the idea that those months of struggle have come to define his entire life.

Dorrigo too is a part of all that he has met, which doesn’t mean that everything he encounters has become a part of him. Flanagan has done something difficult here, creating a character who is at once vivid and shadowy. In his long postwar life, Dorrigo will see his own moments of heroism as if performed by someone else. He fulfills his duty while remaining separate from it, and as a husband and father is most often an absent presence. For Flanagan doesn’t limit himself to the war. The novels of Tennyson’s day often took the form of biography, and so does this one. But its path is far from linear, and Flanagan will cut back and forth in Dorrigo’s life: the prison camp, his childhood, a prewar love affair, and then half a century forward. Only on the book’s last pages do we understand the moment in camp that irreparably damaged Dorrigo’s life, and only then will we see that this trauma has little to do with the camp.

Flanagan manages these shifts in time and perspective with extraordinary skill. They’re never confusing but they are dizzying, and demand the reader’s full attention in a way that reminds me of Conrad. I suspect that on rereading, this magnificent novel will seem even more intricate, more carefully and beautifully constructed. And those formal demands aren’t the only ones it makes. Early in the book and late in his life, Dorrigo will tell a mistress he can no longer remember the face of a soldier called Darky Gardiner. The Japanese beat him and he died “and there was no point to it at all.” Two hundred pages later we will watch as Darky, by then the most memorably drawn of Dorrigo’s soldiers, is kicked and pummeled and left to drown in a pool of excrement. A scene in which Dorrigo tries to cut away a soldier’s gangrenous leg is worthy of Zola, sparing us nothing as the doctor searches in the ruins of the man’s body for a bit of artery to clamp.

“The world is,” Dorrigo will think many years later. “It just is.” Still, the book’s most disturbing pages are those in which Flanagan follows the postwar lives of Dorrigo’s captors. The camp’s commandant, Major Nakamura, kills a boy in the ruins of Tokyo and buys a new identity that allows him to escape prosecution as a war criminal. A teenage Korean camp guard isn’t so lucky. The Japanese think of Choi Sang-min as just one step above the “enemy soldiers who had surrendered because they were too cowardly to kill themselves.” They view him with contempt, the prisoners with hatred; the boy goes in fear of them all, and knows he will be punished for showing any restraint. Are these people evil? Some of them. The others merely do evil things. Yet Flanagan isn’t interested in anything as simple as humanizing the enemy. They too are ground within the impersonal processes of history, trapped on a wheel from which there is but one escape. The Allies will hang Choi Sang-min; he won’t understand why, worried instead that he’s owed back pay.

Flanagan is best known for his 2001 novel, “Gould’s Book of Fish,” a grandiloquent oddity, half “Tristram Shandy” and half “Moby-Dick,” about the early history of Australia. His language here seems restrained by comparison, and yet it carries a sinewy incantatory power. On a spree after the war, some of Dorrigo’s men “drank to make themselves feel as they should feel when they didn’t drink, that way they had felt when they hadn’t drunk before the war. For that night they felt ferocious and whole and not yet undone.” But they are. None will have the lives they should have had, not even Dorrigo, who dislikes the pleasure he takes in his own fame. Basho wrote that “Days and months are travelers of eternity,” and Flanagan’s book, like the poet’s own, will push us far down that path. This “Narrow Road to the Deep North” is both unforgiving and generous, a paradox that should earn it some fame of its own.

Source: wikipedia

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