From New Zealand, we travel to Australia. The Antipodes are in favour with the Booker, it would seem. And large, complex plots. Although Richard Flanagan’s book is about half the size of Eleanor Catton’s last year, his story too draws in a myriad threads from far afield and ties them all together in one, rather elegant knot.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North deals with well-worn tropes of love and war but makes of these something powerful and new, chiefly because of the luminous quality of Flanagan’s prose, his deep compassion, and the poetry that spills out of the pages. But the horror of the story stays untempered.
Dorrigo Evans is an Army doctor in charge of a motley crew of Australian prisoners of war who are now part of the Japanese slave labour force building the Siam-Burma railway line deep in the heart of a tropical forest somewhere in Thailand. The sheer hell of their experience rivals the Auschwitzes and Dachaus of war history and only a handful live to tell the tale. Among these broken men is Dorrigo, now a famous doctor and war hero, but irreparably damaged not just by what he has endured but by the loss of his beloved Amy.
The book flits between love story and war journal, but the former is not really an antidote to the latter, and the story stays moored in a long, inexorable autumn — cold with cruelty, dark with rain, hued in the dull shades of death. If there is relief, it comes from the poetry in which the book is steeped. Tennyson’s Ulysses quoted incessantly. Or Basho: ‘ Even in Kyoto / When I hear the cuckoo / I long for Kyoto ’.
Flanagan’s horror is far more terrifying than Conrad’s because it is so real and present, but its location in a terrain unfamiliar to the white man is reminiscent of Conrad — “the Asian mud, the Asian morass, the Asian hell”. One wonders if being tortured in Europe might somehow be made more tolerable by the climate. Of course, Flanagan is too much of a good writer to fall into this trap, and we are allowed to enter the heads and motivations of the Japanese — the conflicted Nakamura, the manic Kota. And he doesn’t send upon them vengeful death but shows them attempting acceptance at worst, absolution at best. This does establish balance, but it seems a bit contrived, and I remain unconvinced.
Flanagan is at his best when he writes about the brutality of the POW camp, the disease, the torture but also the magical bonds, the simple sacrifices. The war history is superb but the love story, despite the beautiful prose, far less so. It poses self-consciously, tragic because it must be, romantic on a supra-human plane.
One loves the hyperbole of a Ghalib or a Donne because it’s so perfectfor those times: ‘ Be thou a new star, that to us portends / Ends of much wonder; and be thou those ends’ . But I baulk when I encounter, on an Australian beach in the 1940s, “the trench… running around her belly like the equator line circling the world”. As in Ondaatje’s English Patient, the veil of words is exquisite but impossibly ethereal.
This verbal felicitousness works brilliantly elsewhere. Flanagan describes the large Keith as being “strewn over the steering wheel like a gale-fallen tree trunk”. And Jack Rainbow’s widow defines love in possibly the simplest lines: “One day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums”.
The book is at its majestic best when it battles to understand the despairing why of war. Dorrigo watching a soldier being brutally beaten thinks fleetingly that he has perhaps cracked the secret of a world where “violence was the great and only verity… had always existed and would never be eradicated….”
If one were to quote Dorrigo’s favourite poem back to him, one would say that Flanagan’s genius lies not in ‘household gods’ but ‘ to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars ’.
