“It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.”

Looking down over Hobart, kunanyi/ Mt Wellington. May 2021.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

As I continue to haphazardly wind my way through Richard Flanagan's oeuvre, I turn towards his Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. A book of many distinct parts, I felt the standout section was Book Three, detailing life in the Japanese prisoner of war camps with the Sisyphean task of building a railway in the jungle with no food, equipment or (for many) the hope of an ending.

Other elements - mainly those centring the love affair between Dorrigo Evans and Amy - I found overly sentimental and unconvincing. Given the internal struggle within Dorrigo, his outward bravery, and generosity juxtaposed with a cold and clinical relationship with his wife and children, the constant return to Amy felt a little forced and false. I could have also done without the twist and reveal of the connection between Dorrigo and poor old Darky Gardiner towards the end.

Enough of the things that I didn't like! Flanagan has created a world of rich and vivid characters that burn bright in the chapters written in the present tense. These same people fade and disappear in those sections seen from the minds of men looking far back. Not afraid to explore the complexities of the importance of remembering and forgetting, the novel gracefully exists in a world of grey moralities in which reasonable people often disappoint and fixed notions of good and evil are unrealistic given the realities of the human condition.

To do this, Flanagan has granted the 'other' of this book a presence and voice. It is a rare thing that the Japanese and Korean prison camp guards who oversee and order the brutal treatment of those in their charge are afforded any kind of inner thoughts, depth or moral ambiguity to their actions or decision-making. Yet, in the infusion of traditional Japanese poetry (the source of the book's title) as one element of their sensibilities, the banality of their cruelty becomes all the more human. As Dorrigo reflects in his seventies:

Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all.

I also respect how the novel returns to familiar themes in his other work, notably that of race in our shared home state of Tasmania. However, unlike the romantic intrigue of the enigmatic Amy, it never seems forced. Indeed, I am sure that the undercurrent of difference and hierarchies between the Tasmanian prisoners may well be missed by those unfamiliar with our twisted and broken histories.

Ultimately, the novel succeeds in exploring the fog that surrounds memory, trauma, love, mateship, race, forgiveness and forgetting. But, unfortunately, I can't give it the full five stars. The improbable melodrama of that bushfire scene, the strange non-presence of Dorrigo's children and the accidental connections revealed seemed too contrived in a novel that encapsulates the very randomness of life, but it only falls millimetres short.

Either way, pack your handkerchief because you are going to need it.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2