“The Narrow Road to the Deep North” tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, whose adulthood happens to coincide with World War II. Dorrigo rises from a hardscrabble boyhood to become a doctor; he goes off to the war, survives, is hailed as a hero and then lives out the rest of his days as a public celebrity and a private scoundrel.
But author Richard Flanagan turns Dorrigo’s time on earth into a carnival ride. He wants us to feel the bumpiness of a distant era, distant even to Dorrigo himself, so the story swings from his youth to old age and back again, passing with every oscillation through the pinch of the hourglass that was the war. Specifically, Burma during the war — a markless stretch of jungle where, in 1943, thousands of Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Thai, Malayan, Burmese and Australian men worked and died as slaves to build a railway, the Burma-Siam Railway, also known as (because it was in fact) the Death Railway.
There are secrets in “The Narrow Road,” revelations that turn our heads, but we know from the first pages what will happen to these 200,000 men: tens of thousands, perhaps 100,000 (no one will ever know the exact number) die of starvation, beatings and disease. Some thousands did survive; yes, they traveled home and lived long (if not full) lives — like the novel’s Dorrigo Evans. He was a hero to the men he led and a hero to the Australian nation, but a heel to his wife and a dead thing to himself while he still lived.
The novel’s centerpiece is the nightmare of the prisoners’ camp along the rail line: Where rain and torture and death and feces swirl together; where an old man along a muddy road “waited for death as a traveler for a bus;” and where “Dorrigo Evans dreamt he was in a pit with God, that they were both bald and that they were fighting over a wig.”
The fulcrum of the book is the endless beating of a single Australian prisoner named Darky Gardiner, in an episode when all the insanity of men’s behavior in war coalesces in a single daylong moment:
“For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilizations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god.”
By leaping across decades, Flanagan helps those of us born in luckier times and places to taste how it feels to fight in a war and then stop fighting and return to an incomprehensible world of peace.
And then when you thought Flanagan had accomplished more than enough to earn his 2014 Man Booker Prize, he writes a half-dozen pages that is the best description of men coming home from war I have ever read:
“Jimmy Bigelow said nothing. He was trying, that was the point, surely? But he didn’t speak. His hopes of becoming a musician, somebody, something, hadn’t worked out. He worked at the zinc works as a storeman. The big-band music he loved was no longer in fashion. The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn’t music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams. You couldn’t dance or fall in love with it, thought Jimmy.”
From time to time Flanagan takes a virtuosic fast-forward hurdle like that to describe a character living the next half-century of life. It is as if we were suddenly sitting up among the gods to watch what happens when we die and the war medals won for courage melt in a fire and trees vault upward over the spot to hide the last trace that people, ever once, had fought for their lives.
Throughout “The Narrow Road,” Flanagan writes with tenderness, a rare quality in these cartoonish literary times, and rarer still in a novel of war, cruelty and senseless death. This book took me by surprise from the start and held me to the end.
Book Review - The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan