Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for his World War II novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a graphic description of life for POWs forced by the Japanese army to build the Burma Railway in 1943. Through the eyes of its flawed hero, Dorrigo Evans, the novel exposes the brutal conditions for soldiers and civilian slave workers, with estimated deaths over 100,000, as well as the impact of that imprisonment and a failed affair on Evans’ life for decades beyond the war.
Evans is a student rather than a soldier, a man in love with literature and poetry going back to the ancient Greeks, a doctor conscripted to fight in the war and eventually made a colonel, a position that carries over to leadership over the other captives as they’re forced to work on the railway even as malnutrition and disease overtake them. Evans is a paragon of virtue in the literal and metaphorical jungle, sacrificing his own well-being to try to keep as many of his men alive as he can, negotiating without leverage to try to get sick men time off the line so they might recover, setting up a makeshift hospital and even performing amputations and surgeries that increase patients’ odds of survival just to something above zero. Flanagan creates a whole cast of eccentrics around Evans to put a veneer of comedy above both the inherent tragedy that many of these men will die there and none will leave unharmed as well as the unstinting descriptions of the physical degradation of life in the labor camp. (Flanagan gives a lot of detail on how the men’s bodies betray them due to dysentery and other parasites, so if you can’t deal with substantial prose about emesis or defecation, this book may not be for you.)
Wrapped around that narrative is a secondary thread about Evans’ romantic life – his quick but futile attachment to Ella, whom he marries but to whom he is serially unfaithful for decades, and his one affair, during the war, with Amy, the young wife of Evans’ uncle Keith. Amy is very much his one who got away, but after the war their affair does not resume, and he returns to Ella and a life of emotional isolation and meandering. Evans struggles to balance that internal void against his rising profile as a national hero, a man who fought to protect his men from the worst their Japanese tormentors could dish out and who himself survived to be celebrated, even as he feels worse about himself and can’t find any meaning in all of their suffering.
That choice by Flanagan detracts from the center of the novel, which focused on life in the slave camp from the perspectives of Evans and the Japanese officer, by the way it splinters the reader’s focus and fails to adequately tie the Amy subplot into anything else other than the connection through Dorrigo. The storycraft within each plot thread is very well-executed, and the prose, while often difficult to stomach, is erudite and evocative, so that each individual chapter or section works on its own. The finished product lacked some of the unity that a great novel like this, that covers an enormous historical event by casting a wide net, needs to have to truly hit its ceiling.
Next up: Still reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings.