WINNER of the Man Booker Prize this year, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is an unflinching account of the Australian POWs at the Thailand-Burma death Railway during World War II. At first it reads like a love story but as you delve deeper into the narrative the themes get grander and the plot metamorphoses into an odyssey of survival.

Mostly narrated from the perspective of a doctor named Dorrigo Evans, the plot moves back and forth between random past events and the present.

Dorrigo, a man of humble origins with a promising future as a surgeon, is engaged to Ella, a gentle and loving girl belonging to the privileged class, before the war; his future seems to be completely figured out. Things however go awry when he encounters the wild, unfathomable Amy, who is also his uncle’s wife. Dorrigo and Amy find themselves in a secret affair so fierce it consumes their lives, leaving them unable to accord meaning to their ‘real’ lives.

During the war, Dorrigo is captured by the Japanese forces only to become a prisoner at the infamous railway line. As the colonel of his division every day he negotiates with Nakamura, the Japanese officer incharge and a methamphetamine addict, about the fate of his men who seem to die like flies. Dorrigo also looks after the sick as best as he can without any medical equipment or medicines. Those days were “built like a scream that never ended”, imparting only suffering, hunger, violence, cruelty, sickness and dying, depleting a person of life, leaving behind only a void, the antithesis of the Line, “that ever lengthening railway line of madness”. Very few of the prisoners survived the war and Dorrigo Evans was one of them.

In the present we find he has become a national celebrity, a war hero, who not only survived the cruelties of life as a POW but also helped other prisoners as a doctor and their leader in the camp. He realises that he shares certain features with the war heroes but in his heart he believes he is not one of them: “He’s just had more success living than dying”. His personal life also is not so glorious: despite being married to Ella he harbours relations with different women but is still haunted by the memory of Amy.

Flanagan reminds us that “the annals of the past are a muddy story” as the Japanese were mentally conditioned to obey the ‘Japanese spirit’ and ‘the will of the Emperor’ and yet, after the war, the Americans hanged many of them for their war crimes but not the Emperor. After the war “that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away” and “of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass”.

Flanagan gives other prisoners and their Japanese and Korean guards a separate narrative voice in the latter chapters, thereby complicating the idea of the victim. He also daringly took the title of this book from the Japanese poet Basho’s great haiku ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’; yet the title is a poignant reminder of the frailty of an individual life in the face of temporal forces. When a journalist questions the justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Dorrigo tells him that he knows war as one thing whereas “war is many things”. But deep down he knows that “there was no meaning in it, not then and not now”.

Memories as a tool, albeit fragmented, to understand personal history is one of the recurrent themes of the piece. We do not experience life in a neatly ordered, chronological journey from past to present. It is chiefly through the framework of our past memories that we give coherence to our present and the perception of our true identities. For Flanagan subjectivity and truth make quite a problematic territory because with time our memories keep molding the past. This is to enable us to filter out or transform our lives and thus make it easier for us to live with what we’ve done. Flanagan explains how the Australian POWs and the Japanese railway engineers and soldiers lived in a time and place beyond the cognitive abilities of those who have not experienced it themselves. Looking back at their lives Dorrigo finds that in real life “horror has no form than meaning. Horror just is”.

Flanagan further distorts the idea of a stable self by showing how with time people can change beyond recognition. If Dorrigo is in a strange marriage, unable to show his affection to his children, Nakamura has became a gentle and loving father and husband after the war. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North the good and bad are not painted in shades of white and black; the real lives, we find, are too complicated for such tidy classifications. Dorrigo and Nakamura are equally haunted by their past deeds: Dorrigo is frustrated by the fact that he is not as good a man as people have come to believe and Nakamura builds his later life on a virtuous model in order to convince himself that in his heart he is a good man. What they all share, in essence, is the difficulty to live on after survival.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a contemporary classic of war fiction, is a deserving winner. It may not be an enjoyable read and you might find it very hard to read intense description of inhuman brutality and physical and visceral suffering but it is a very powerful book. Flanagan strips life of its meaning only to reveal how, despite the harrowing experiences, life is an exquisite poem. His brutal yet beautiful writing gives rise to many contradictory emotions in you that it is hard to assimilate them in words.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

(NOVEL)

By Richard Flanagan

Random House, UK

ISBN 978-0701189051

464pp.