Like me Flanagan is the child of a Second World War veteran. Flanagan’s father suffered as a Japanese prisoner of war whilst my father experienced constant danger and injury as a submariner. Neither man would have expected to come through such experiences and indeed neither came out either physically or mentally unscarred. As such Flanagan and I are both children of the war, although we were also born decades after it had finished and our father’s lives had by then returned to the normality of wives and children and jobs.
Like many men of that generation our fathers simply got on with their lives once they returned to civvie street and barely mentioned those years again. Flanagan’s novel gives us all a chance to ask questions of them, to find out what it was really like; the questions most of them found it too painful to answer.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the story of Alwyn ‘Dorrigo’ Evans; surgeon, husband, father, womaniser and war hero. It follows Dorrigo’s life from small boy in Tasmania through to a youthful affair with his uncle’s wife, life as a POW when he takes charge of a group of prisoners in the jungle who are slave labourers on the Thai-Burma railway, and his marriage and later years as he lays dying and facing a lifetime of regrets.
The title of the novel is borrowed from a 17th century Japanese poem by Matsuo Basho. Flanagan has said that this poem represents one of the highpoints of Japanese culture, whereas the crime against humanity that is represented by the Japanese prisoner of war camps is one of Japan’s lowest points.
Flanagan’s novel is based partly on the story of real-life Australian war hero ‘Weary’ Dunlop a doctor at a Japanese POW camp. The men under his command and care, forced to construct the Thai-Burma railway, came to be known as ‘Dunlop’s thousand’ and hold nearly mythical status in Australia, although they are barely known here in the UK. Flanagan’s father was one of these men and his experiences are also used in the construction of this novel.
Although this is a story about war it’s also a deeply affecting love story between Dorrigo and Amy, the young wife of his uncle, which stands in stark contrast to the horrors that Dorrigo and his men suffer. The presence of love is essential to the story that these men tell because it offers hope and truth. And as Dorrigo suffers and vainly tries to protect the men under his command, he receives a letter that will change the course of his life. This is a story about the despair and the power of love.
The structure of this novel is far more ambitious and demanding than this straightforward reading suggests. The reader is flipped backwards and forwards in time and Flanagan sweeps the reader through a series of perspectives so that we are faced with sympathising not just with the Australian prisoners but also with their tormentors, the Japanese. As all the men age they are confronted with the past and the lies they tell themselves so that they can live in the present.
The men who cannot lie remain silent for years and appear absent, like Jimmy Bigelow who ‘worked as a mail sorter and never seemed interested in rising beyond it. One day in highschool (his daughter) had asked her father to tell her what the war had been like for him. He said there wasn’t really that much to tell.’
I read the passages about the beatings and torture perpetrated by the Japanese and understood for the first time the visceral hatred that many British servicemen of the second world war often felt for the Japanese; a hatred even greater than they many of them held for the Germans. In fact until he died my father refused to have anything Japanese in our home (my mother, a keen and creative cook, hid a book on Japanese cooking from my father. He was in his 80s then and the war over for more than sixty years).
But Flanagan shows us the Japanese as family men who have left the war behind them. They are transformed into men who write poetry and treat their children with kindness. Flanagan doesn’t take the easy way out and offer us pure evil and as such it’s not a comfortable read if you need the certainty and comfort of hatred.
I wonder what my father and other men like him would have made of it. Like Jimmy Bigelow I doubt he would have wanted to put it into words.
The Narrow Road to the deep North is the deserved winner of this year’s Man Booker prize.