richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north

Torture is almost irrelevant as the men, desperately weakened by starvation and disease, whether victims or onlookers, are passively accepting. Gradually the jaunty Aussies, who initially sing and joke and greatly bewilder captors conditioned to serve the emperor, disintegrate. Juxtaposed with all of these sequences is the finest writing in the book, harrowing scenes in which Australian prisoners of war are goaded and brutalised by their Japanese guards as they work on the Death Railway, or the Line, a 415km stretch between Burma and Thailand. He also plots the later lives of the major Japanese characters and the men they became after their wartime careers. A week earlier the boy had also been watching as his older brother embraced the wife of the man who had wept.įlanagan follows him back and forth between prewar Tasmania, Melbourne and Adelaide and on to postwar Sydney. He recalls the day he saw a grown man sit at his mother’s kitchen table and cry, an unusual sight by any reckoning, particularly in early 20th-century Tasmania. Secure and protected, he can play, confident that his mother will tend his wounds. The opening sentences of this powerful, often brutal love story are deceptively beautiful: “Dorrigo Evans’s earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother.”

His eyes were only for the ball, but he sensed he would not make it running at the speed he was, and so he leapt, his feet finding the back of one boy, his knees the shoulders of another and so he climbed into the full dazzle of the sun, his arms stretched out high above him, he felt the ball arrive in his hands, and he knew he could now begin to fall out of the sun.” He understood the ball dangling from the sun was his and all he had to do was rise. “Time slowed, he found all the space he needed in the crowding spot into which the biggest, strongest boys were now rushing.

Evans, who is based on the Australian surgeon Edward “Weary” Dunlop (1907-93), endures into old age, and, for all the success and subsequent honours he gathers, this loneliest of men never again recaptures the glory he experienced in the school yard when playing with the bigger boys. Chance often seems to favour Dorrigo Evans, the remote central character of the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan’s Homeric sixth novel, an epic about life and death and the grim burden of survival.

Richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north