The Narrow Road to the Deep North

A good book, Dorrigo Evans thought, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

I have no idea if this book forced me to reread my soul, but it forced me to take stock several times, often, take a deep breath and wonder why and how I had been emotionally smashed. This remarkable novel contains some of the most profound passages I have ever read about how mankind deals with love and death; add to that, the stealing of generations of their youth and identity, a comment on the Stolen Generations, an Australian travesty.

The plot is a blend of stories that author Richard Flanagan's father had told him of his time as an Australian prisoner of war on the Burma–Thailand Railway in WW2, along with a few other tales that Flanagan had heard over the years, his reading of the classics such as Ulysses and his admiration of haiku poetry.

My need to reread this magnificent book is compelling.
Several days after finishing it, I still think about it.

Days and months are travellers of eternity. So too the years that pass by.

https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/10/17/4109128.htm

What I had suspected to be its apparent weakness turned out to be its spirit by the time the book approached its ending. For all the myriad images of life's many ironies, there is a seething intended unemotionality with which Flanagan goes about describing, narrating, and weaving the tales around characters that come alive as and when they give themselves up in the face of their daunting lives one by one.
With themes of loneliness and its likeliness in life amidst the great hopes and expectations that human beings harbor in their minds, only to gradually fleet away as unfulfilled feelings, the author spans through lives that are connected by suffering on the Burma Death Railway and beyond.
In not attempting to pretend and find explanation for why the world is as it is or isn't, the book is able to illuminate more moments of the palpable human space with a strangely aloof but rooted sincerity of observation:
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful”.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is able to portray human nature in its raw and complex form; through a manifestation of a spectrum of choices, actions and responses grounded within domains of love and war. The incessant being of being painfully human, in more pain than otherwise, is deftly stringed by the author in a stream-of-sorely-poetic-consciousness:
“When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections”.
Flanagan ensures that his characters remain flawed; the imperfections manifesting in an abundance of words, and gestures. He would rather not endorse you to really like or dislike anyone. That's one thing I have the taste of in my mouth after leaving the text. For a large part, as a reader, I found myself on a narrow road which eventually led my mind to a deep north, or a deep somewhere.
Post-reading, the surprisingly abstract title of the book got its pulse to start beating; it gradually
settled within the structure of ironies and paradox of remembrances and forgetting. The poetic warmth of haikus with which the timelessness of time is treated around the unbearable physical pain and drudgery of war is one of the glimpses the narration portrays:
“Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.”
Ultimately, however, the book is about the strange milieu humans are made up of; and their heart that is sinewed with what is fragile and yet what is stoically strong like an endlessly enduring quest.

There's no doubt this book will be on my Best Books of the Year list. It will also go on my Best Books Ever Read list. But I don't think I will ever reread it; it was a deeply emotional read.

What is the story? The plot has a huge timeframe, with the book spanning the childhood to old age of a man who served in World War II as an officer in the Australian military, and the story centers on the time the officer spent in a Japanese POW camp while his fellow soldiers were forced to build a railroad through the jungle in horrific conditions. The author is amazingly able to assume the point-of-view of not only the main character, Dorrigo, but also Dorrigo's fellow soldiers, his on-the-sly girlfriend, his girlfriend's husband, his wife, and even his tormentors in the Japanese POW camp. The author did this so well that I was able to empathize with an Australian soldier while he is being beaten to death, as well as the Japanese officer allowing the Australian to be beaten, and that is astonishing.

The experiences of all of the people in the story were appalling because of the impossibility of the situations; no one could take action without having both bad and good results.

Isn't that real life, pushed to the extreme, of course?

“Why at the beginning of things is there always light?”

My head is full of a plethora of thoughts that, somehow, need to find their way into a text? Or do they? Probably not. This must be one of the most difficult reviews I have chosen to write and this is not a cliche. It's reality. Difficult because how can one possibly describe the horrors brought about by monsters in one of the darkest eras of History that, sadly seems not too far away or lost in time? Difficult because love and pain and lose are feelings that cannot be easily turned into paragraphs or measured by phrases “this is good”, “this is bad”. Difficult because no matter how hard I tried, no matter how mesmerizing the writing was at times, this book will not enter my favourites. We failed to form any kind of connection.

Dorrigo Evans is a surgeon in the Australian Army during the nightmare of the Second World War. He and his regiment are now prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Burma and the plague is quickly descending. So he is needed by friends and enemies alike, because there is a bridge that needs to be built and it won't wait. Dorrigo struggles to keep his men alive, physically and psychologically, and most of all, he tries to preserve his own will to live and not give up. Because he started feeling dead long before he became a POW. His mind travels back in time, to his younger days, and to the event that defined him and defeated him more than any other battle he had ever given. His relationship with Amy, a young woman, his uncle's wife.

“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”

Dorrigo is the most complex, interesting character in those pages. He is a kind human being, considerate and brave. He loves with all his heart, he fights to keep his men with him, but he is never happy. He cannot find happiness, he feels that every joy is a fleeting moment for which he is somehow unworthy. There were parts when I felt that Dorrigo had actually fallen victim to a weird notion of self-depreciation, of self-pity. He was broken beyond repair. But why? For whom? For Amy? For himself?

“My disgraceful, wicked heart”, thought Amy, “ is braver than the world.”

It seemed to me that Amy was the driving force of the story. She is definitely a controversial character, but she provides life. When I was reading Amy's POV, I was thinking that Flanagan had reserved the most beautiful language in this novel for her. There is a calmness and a tenderness, a childish spirit that suits Amy, although we somehow feel that the storm is about to break, on many levels. That the underlying terrors will soon become reality. And even though, many may call her “wicked”, “selfish” or “manipulative”, for me she is the breath of life in the book.

Flanagan provides many points of view. Too many, in my opinion. He divides the stories of the Australian and the Japanese characters almost equally and I found that this made the story significantly slower. I appreciated the Haiku references and the fact that he didn't omit the enemy's voice, creating a highly balanced narration. What I felt as a reader was that these characters weren't interesting enough to turn my mind away from Dorrigo and Amy's fate. As simple as that. They obviously served the purpose of the writer (and I don't dare to presume as to what it was) but they made me lose much of my initial connection to the story. I admit I skimmed quite a few pages of the Japanese chapters. I couldn't bring myself to care for them. In addition, the part of the book set after the end of the war felt slow, flat and melodramatic.

There were two things I deeply appreciated in the novel. First, Flanagan's use of the question of morality was exceptional. What is considered “moral”? What of the feelings that are experienced by all of us and may come in utter contrast with issues like fidelity or bravery or mercy? Especially in times of war when these things cease to matter. The second was the way the horrors of the camp were depicted. I found the chapters harrowing, haunting, raw, but not in any way disgusting or written for the sake of shock value. In fact, a minor issue I had was that there were times when I thought he played it safe, choosing the “easier” road. Sometimes, the situation called for language with more punch, more tension. There have been films and books about the subject that are more nightmarish, more realistic even.

The writing was at times exceptionally poignant and darkly poetic. Other times, I found it verbose, tiresome, melodramatic. Apart from the interactions in the camp, I felt that the dialogue resembled the old 40s films. Now, perhaps my stone -hearted self has taken over (once again...), but in my opinion, dialogue such as this is a bit unrealistic and inconsistent with the powerful themes dealt with in the rest of the novel. Keith and Ella's characters seemed copied out of cliches and I couldn't abide with this.

My journey with this Booker Prize winner started in anticipation and excitement, but somehow, my way fell flat. Yes, this is a special book, beautiful in a disturbing way. However, when I skipped too many pages, when I felt nothing, no connection throughout the story, when I compare it to other war novels, I cannot bring myself to rate it more than 3 stars. Will I recommend it to a friend? Certainly. Do I consider it memorable? Yes. But I do not think this is the best war novel ever written and certainly not one of the best books ever written. It gave me nothing I hadn't read before....

Prachtig boek, maar niet 100% overtuigd dat het liefdesverhaal als sub-plot nou heel veel toevoegde. De achterflap suggereerde dat wel (plus dat een in Birma ontvangen brief “alles anders” maakte), maar vond dat wel meevallen...

De stukken die over het jappenkamp gaan (en de diverse draadjes over de diverse soldaten) zijn zeer indringend en maken de **.

The reader was good and the story detailed and absorbing but it was incredibly depressing.

Given the glowing reviews and awards bestowed on this book I was really surprised how poor this book is. It's amazing how this book makes a very interesting and emotional subject boring, disjointed and cold. Very dissapointing.

If you like a light read, do not pick up this book.... It might, it will, it should disturb you.

We have come at a time where very few survivors are still around to tell their story. Meanwhile, it seems far enough away so that we can look at situations from the perspective of both parties involved. Flanagan's writing makes the horrors of the WW2 POW camps come closer than you might feel comfortable with. I put down the book regularly while reading, but I always picke it back up again. This book definitely deserved the Man Booker Prize, in my humble opinion

This novel took me months to read. Not because it was at all boring, but because I felt that I had to savour it. I had to read it in instalments to properly understand it. At times, I did consider giving up, but something always drew me back in. That something was Richard Flanagan's writing.

There were times when a sentence or paragraph would cause me to catch my breath. I had to put the book down and stare at the wall while I contemplated what he said and how he said it.

The book also took me a long time to get through because there are some seriously horrific scenes to take in - Systematic beheadings of Chinese POW's; vivisections of live US airman; the daily torture and living conditions of the Australian POW's. I needed to build my nerve and strength before plunging into the horror of war again.

POSSIBLE SPOILER: I didn't always like Dorrigo Evans – at least – I liked Dorrigo Evans the doctor and during his time in the war, but Dorrigo Evans the husband – not so much (probably due to the fact he was a serial adulterer – and I admit I am quite judgemental about adulterers). I know men returned from the war as shells of their former selves, but the fact that he felt like he had to sleep with other women to validate his love for Amy really annoyed me. Yet at the end he redeemed himself as a husband and father.

The characters I fell for in this book were the ones on the periphery: Darky Gardiner, Tiny, even the old Greek owner of Nikitaris's Fish and Chip shop. I loved reading about them.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a beautifully written, haunting read. It weaves the horrors of war together with its disastrous aftereffects. I am glad I stayed with it – even if it took three months.