Richard Flanagan’s parents told him and his siblings a story about a Latvian man who after the war, “…went back to his village and he found his wife was dead. He refused to believe that and searched for her everywhere in the vast desolate world (of Europe) for two years and in the end had to admit she was dead…he came to Australia…married an Australian woman, had children…and one day in Sydney when he was walking and he saw his Latvian wife with two children …he had few minutes to decide what to do…”
And what did he do? Before we find the answer, more about the book by Flanagan, “The Narrow Road to Deep North”; he won the Booker Prize for 2014 and has dedicated his book to a name followed by the number 335. “It was my father’s number. It was a number myself and my brothers and sisters grew up with. Unlike many others my father used to talk to some extent, of what had happened in the PoW camps…it took 12 years for me to write…I chose the title from one of the finest works in Japanese literature written by the great Haiku poet Basha in the 17th Century. My father’s experience and that of his mates was one of the low points in Japanese civilization and I wanted to use some of the techniques of the high points of Japanese culture to explore this very low point.”
The novel tells the story, “…of a man who ends up in a camp of PoWs and tries to build up a picture of war, love, guilt, memory and all that strange chaos that haunts us all… My father used to laugh a lot…he told funny stories but always tinged with a pathos but they were not stories of horror or hate. I can’t remember when I heard the stories first…they acquire more and more strange meanings to you as you grow up…he never presented it as heroism, he presented it as but as love and fraternity and humour…what people have and do when every other vestige of humanity is stripped away from them,” says Flanagan.
Unwilling to sit judgement on any of his characters or the story itself, Flanagan says the measure of his story the one he grew up with, “The only thing that we grew up having measure up to was that it did not matter to him (my dad) about your achievements but what mattered was how you treated people…your people at school, people who lived around you and how you treated the poorest and the weakest. I won the Rhodes scholarship…I told my dad…and he said, if you should met with triumph or disaster, treat those two impostors just the same…and that was it! …(Later) when I have had triumphs and when I have had disasters, he made me realize they are illusions too…he acquired all that from the experience of the camps.”
Dorrigo Evans, the main character of the book is fascinated by words…my father who was the son of two illiterates said to me when I asked him why he loved poetry which he used to recite all the time, “…because in my world there was no art no music and the written word was the first beautiful thing I ever knew…Dorrigo absorbs words without judgement and in the end he simple feels Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and he has become one…”
As you wonder about a man who could bring the most cruel and most elegant of ideas into one novel, he says, “Within every human breast there exists the universe and contained within our nature is infinite love and most murderous impulses…we contain of the beauty of the Basha and the death throw away… Love stories are about death. We understand we glimpse the infinite and the universe in love, but we also know it is ephemeral…the strange paradox about love and that is why all great love stories are also about death. War illuminates love…and love allows us…we cannot stand too much reality, so if you write about reality…so terrifying you must have something that bounces it spiritually and for the sake of a novel, artistically.”
To find the answer to the question we set out with, however, we have to read Flanagan.
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