The modern novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North takes its name from the classic work The Narrow Road to the Deep North; a nature journal/travelogue, written in haiku and prose, by the celebrated 16th century Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō. The motivation for this borrowing, according to author Richard Flanagan, was very personal:
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war. He was a survivor of the Death Railway in what was then Siam and is today Thailand, of cholera, of the hellships that took POWs to Japan, of being a slave labourer in a coal mine under the Inland Sea. If Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father and his mates’ experience is one of its lowest. I wanted to use some of the forms and tropes of Japanese literature — which I admire greatly — to help me divine this most terrible story in a way that might illuminate, but never judge.And this is exactly the book that Flanagan wrote: at one and the same time making a record of his father's horrific POW experiences and presenting the Japanese prison guards as men of personal honour who were simply fulfilling the wishes of their beloved Emperor; that the lives of the prisoners could be so brutally described, yet the Japanese weren't exactly presented as monsters, is a masterful literary accomplishment. (That the murders committed by a sadistic Colonel with a fetish for beheading random prisoners with his sword could be equated with the beauty and economy of a haiku speaks to the degree to which Flanagan himself seems to have come to an understanding of his father's former tormentors.)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North weaves together three threads from the main character's, Dorrigo Evans', life (loosely based on the real Australian war hero, Col. "Weary" Dunlop): his youth in Tasmania and prewar days in Australia (where he becomes a doctor and meets both his future wife, Ella, and the forbidden love of his life, Amy); his brief military career and eventual life as a POW (and by virtue of his rank, CO of the prisoners and the one who chooses each day which of the dying men are fit to join the workgang constructing the Thai-Burma Railway); and his postwar years as a philandering husband, barely adequate surgeon, and celebrated war hero. The perspectives of other characters are shown along the way (from that of his long-suffering wife to that of the Japanese commander of the POW camp; he looking back at the end of a long and happy life), and as intended, this is judgement-free; as Dorrigo's mother told him when he was a little boy: life just is.
The writing has a taut and economical feel, but paints lovely pictures, as when he unexpectedly caught a football as a young boy in a group of much larger boys:
The smell of the eucalyptus bark, the bold, blue light of the Tasmanian midday, so sharp he had to squint hard to stop it slicing his eyes, the heat of the sun on his taut skin, the hard, short shadows of the others, the sense of standing on a threshold, of joyfully entering a new universe while your old still remained knowable and holdable and not yet lost -- all these things he was aware of, as he was aware of the hot dust, the sweat of the other boys, the laughter, the strange pure joy of being with others.Or as he lay with Amy before deploying:
He was looking past Amy's naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.There were scenes that tackled the universal:
Nothing endures. Don’t you see? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this?And scenes that brought the action down to the level of the personal:
In the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all -- the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage -- the strange terrible neverendingness of human beings.And these two opposites make for the disconnect in Dorrigo's life that's at the heart of this book: he recognises that while humanity suffers from neverendingness, humans are bound to be forgotten; that while we marvel at the pyramids, we conveniently forget the mass graves of the slave workforce, and most of all, that it doesn't even matter; life just is. So as Dorrigo has been recognised late in life as a war hero, as national and professional honours are pressed upon him, it's all meaningless to him, and as this is the story of one man's life, when his death comes, even it is meaningless after all. All of this makes for an engaging, thought-provoking reading experience.
But it's not a perfect reading experience: because Dorrigo is this diffident character, even his love affair with Amy -- the memory of which sustains him through the brutality of the POW camp -- is fairly lifeless. And I wanted more about the postwar years -- because the timeline skips around, the reader learns early that Dorrigo is this celebrated figure, but how that ever actually came about, is never made clear. And there were some coincidences thrown in near the end that rang false (even if one, as it turns out, was based on a true story): I didn't like that Darky Gardiner -- after being such a fantastic character -- turned out to be Dorrigo's unknown nephew; and I didn't like Dorrigo and Amy passing on the Sydney Harbour Bridge all those years later -- and that's the true bit, but I didn't like its place in this book.
Yet, even with my quibbles, I'm putting The Narrow Road to the Deep North to the top of the Man Booker Prize list (so far). Flanagan has succeeded in his goal to preserve his father's experiences -- with the benefit of judgement-free hindsight -- and it has the feeling of a modern classic; like a book that could endure like the pyramids while acknowledging the graves.
*Turns out that Richard Flanagan has won the Booker for this year with Narrow Road to the Deep North, and that pleases me fine.
Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2014, with my ranking:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
It's interesting to me that Dave will be going to Japan this week (and that one of the reviewers for The Narrow Road to the Deep North said that this book is "a corrective to Pierre Boulle’s “The Bridge over the River Kwai" -- the author, of course, of Monkey Planet; the source for the original Planet of the Apes). I don't think Dave has any particular prejudice against the Japanese as warmongers (he did have a fairly visceral experience when work took him to Germany a couple of years ago), and I only have such ideas of them through books like The Wreckage and Unbroken that I wouldn't call a prejudice, so Richard Flanagan does history a service by memorialising the time for future generations (and perhaps does justice a service by keeping it judgement-free. More on Flanagan here). That's not to say that the Japanese aren't still somewhat exotic to us here -- no matter how westernized they become -- and this is my favourite recent story:
Dave is heading to Tokyo at the request of a group of Japanese businessmen who are trying to set up a specialised pork importing business. They were at the plant last month for a dry run of the product they're interested in, and the trial did NOT go well. At dinner that night, a Mr. Kobiashi turned to my disappointed husband and said in one of those Hollywood-perfect Japanese accents, complete with strange pauses and inflections that I can't capture here: "David-san. Do not worry. When you come to Japan, if it does not go well, I will teach you hari-kari."
"Did you just say...?"
"Yes, David-san. Hari-kari."
And then the business-suited foreign executive mimed disemboweling himself, complete with grunts and grimaces. And Dave hooted with relief.
