The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The book under review, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, received the Man Booker Prize in 2014. The award citation on the Booker website acclaims it as "a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle's wife", but it is more than that. For some readers, the book which might evoke the flavor of another outstanding Booker winner "English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje, weaves an elaborate story of love, hardship, and bravery during Second World War in South East Asia. Dorrigo Evans, a Tasmanian doctor, finds love in the arms of Amy, his uncle's young wife, whom he had met two years earlier. But, soon he is sent overseas to join the Allied efforts to push back the Axis forces rising to the rank of colonel in the Royal Australian Army, and in 1943 captured by the Japanese in Java. As a POW, Dorry as he is known to his friends, was shipped to the jungles of Thailand where he works in the Burma railway project, the "Death Railway" as it was known, and, a major segment of the book describes in details the conditions in the POW camp, the treatment meted out by the Japanese captors, and the dreams and aspirations of the POWs.

Flanagan, an Australian who had written five previous novels and has received several international honors, writes lucidly and imbues his narrative with references to Japanese haikus and Tennyson's "Ulysses". The research that preceded this semi-historical project is impressive, particularly on the pre-WWII Australian and Tasmanian society, conditions in the jungles of Siam, Japan's rule of Manchukuo, advances in medicine, circumstances facing the soldiers returning from the front in Japan and Australia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to the Booker website, his father who "died the day Flanagan finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway".

The title of the book is taken from an identical one, a travelogue by Basho Matsuo, a 17th century Japanese haiku poet credited with the development of the modern haiku form, who walks from Tokyo to the northern reaches of Honshu on foot.  The novel has three interesting threads: The love life of the protagonists, the minute details and operational struggles of building a railroad through dense monsoon forest during the Second World War, and the evil effects of the war on the various warriors: Japanese, Australian POWs, and the sole Korean. The judges for the 2014 award describe the book as "a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it." We can follow the life of Dorry from his childhood to his final days, but what makes this novel beyond the pale of ordinary is the great pains the author goes to bring alive the ecstasy and agony of a man in love, although the stylistics is at places a little cliché. For example, in describing Dorry's disappointment in losing Amy, Flanagan writes, "He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth."

For romantics, the book has many memorable passages, though, and each of them offers us a peek into the passion that Dorry nurtured both during the war and his long and distinguished career as a surgeon after. When Dorry was in the POW camp, a letter from his wife only brought him closer to Amy. "What, he wondered, was this desire to be with her, and only her, to be with her night and day, to hang off even the dreariest of her anecdotes, the most obvious of her observations, to run his nose against her back, to feel her legs wrapping around his, hear her moan his name, this desire overwhelming everything else in his life?"

We get a similar vision in the mental state of the young doctor.  "When he looked at patients they were just windows through which he saw her and only her. Every cut, every incision, every procedure and suture he made seemed clumsy, awkward, pointless. Even when he was away from her he could see her, smell her musky neck, gaze into her bright eyes, hear her husky laugh." 

Ironically, the lovers, separated by the war, were destined to live their lives separately after the war ends owing to two interesting twists. Dorry was informed by his wife Ella in a letter he received in the POW camp that the pub that his uncle operated with his young wife, Amy, was burnt and both of them perished in the fire.  She, on the other hand, survived and felt let down when Dorry came back to Australia as a war hero, but made no efforts to get in touch with her. 

We see the power of "abhiman" a Bengali word that we take so much pride in but which does not have a literal equivalent in English.  The sentiment of abhiman, or pique, is very aptly woven into Amy's state of mind after she learnt that Dorry had survived the war rather than die as a POW as she had heard from her husband Keith when he was alive. As he rose to fame and his professional star kept on rising, she felt hurt and let down by him. She felt a strong sense of abhiman. She asks, "Why, why, if he had been alive, had he not come back to find her? … And whenever she came close to writing a letter, making a phone call, she saw before her the huge obstacle of his rejection of her in never having sought her out, in not having come back for her after the war, as he had promised. "

After almost two decades of the end of the war, at the height of the Vietnam War, when the Americans were flocking Sydney on leave, the ill-fated lovers meet for a few minutes on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  She was there with her two young nieces her suburbs for sightseeing, while he was walking from his hospital to visit a friend living on the other side in Kirribilli. "It was when he drew himself up from the side rail and resumed walking that he first glimpsed her in the distance, momentarily stepping out from one such bar of slanting darkness into the light." Ironically, this magical moment on the bridge, and the plight of the soldiers while building the railroad, might evoke the memories of " Bridge on the River Kwai", a movie based on a novel by Pierre Bouelle and captures the efforts to blow up a strategic bridge by the British on the same railway project.

The reviewer lives and works in Boston, USA.