BOOK
every man. The novel
REVIEW BILL MACPHERSON
From horrors to humanity
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan (Vintage International)
Honoring his father who worked
on the Siam-Burma Railway, celebrated Australian novelist and journalist Richard Flanagan has written a piece-de-resistance story of eloquent beauty and harsh, horrific brutality. Moreover, he captures the
humanity and inhumanity of man in its most base elements while managing to soar above the day-to- day and define the indomitable spirit necessary to survive along with the follies and weaknesses inherent in
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explores themes of being, will and spirit like few I have read. It is compelling, moving, and occasionally beyond immediate
comprehension in its sense of place, time and meaning. In broad brushstrokes, The
Narrow Road to the Deep North recounts the life of one man. Dorrigo Evans is the antithesis of a war hero. He is celebrated, but deliberately ignorant of what that exactly means to him after what he has lived through. The horrors of the POW camp
in the middle of Burma/Siam (now Thailand), building a futile railroad through sheer dint of effort to survive – a railroad that will do nothing to further the Japanese war
efforts, apparent to all involved but driven by the Japanese sensibility of honor and unyielding will – nearly unhinges him. Only through example, and by
default, can he survive and minimize the deaths of his compatriots stuck in the hell on earth they try to endure. This is what Dorrigo Evans
experiences, and is shaped by. The true beauty and strength of Flanagan’s novel is really how little of it is about the terrible death camp and wretched state of those forced to exist, to live and die within it. Rather, the novel rises above those immediate horrors to speak to humanity itself – the falsity of war, the unknowing bravado and naïve innocence – what is left behind, how the world seems to divide into two distinct and completely opposite parts, and the dichotomy between those two states. Moving back and forth in time
between the camp that defines him to his men and the country, the
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